Health@Davos: Trends in Tech for Health Equity

Welcome to the unDavos Summit - A community-organized series of interactive panels, talks, and networking taking place in Davos, Switzerland - and online - in parallel to the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting 20-24 Jan 2025. Our mission is threefold: 
• Democratizing Davos: We open the doors to diverse voices and ideas, breaking down traditional barriers to participation. 
• Humanizing Davos: We foster genuine, relationship-driven connections that go beyond transactional networking. 
• Bringing Action to Davos: We turn meaningful discussions into tangible, real-world solutions. 

Join us for Health@Davos 2025, an essential event titled “Advancing Global Health Policy & Innovation,” scheduled for January 22, 2025, at the Mountain Plaza Hotel in Davos. This dynamic gathering is designed to inspire impactful conversations around future-proofing global health systems amid the challenges posed by climate change, technological advancements, and mental health crises.

Our panel will feature a diverse lineup of influential speakers:
- Laura Herman, Partner at Dalberg, will initiate the discussion with insights on global trend sensing for health equity.
- Dr. Joneigh S. Khaldun, President & CEO of the Public Health Accreditation Board, and Dr. Craig Spencer, Emergency Medicine Physician at Brown University School of Public Health, will delve into building global health resilience.
- Dr. John Q. Young, Senior VP for Behavioral Health at Northwell Health, alongside industry experts like Tisha Boatman from Siemens Healthineers and Dustin Ross from Sunflower Network, will explore trends in technology for advancing health equity.
- His Excellency Dr. Mohamed Irfaan Ali, President of Guyana, will deliver a keynote on climate change and government roles in health.
- Additional discussions will include a focus on health equity in the age of climate change, and the role of AI in solving global healthcare challenges.

This event promises to empower healthcare leaders and innovators to shape future strategies that foster resilience and equity in global health. 

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Transcript

(00:07) [Music] we're going to point you toward the QR code to get a little bit more about everybody's background so I'm going to dive right into the questions which I've been instructed to do um and the topic for today is how we can advance technology in order to address the Health Equity Gap that we see globally so we know that there are about two billion people who don't have access to medicines and vaccines and Healthcare overall so I want to start here with Tisha and ask a question to you about um how you've seen the use of early
(00:44) Diagnostics and I know a little bit about what you've done with TB but if you could just talk a little bit about what we might be able to learn from your case example at Seaman sure and yeah my name is Tisha Bowman I'm from Seaman Health Anders I head up government Affairs as well as our Health Access business I mean you know Sean health and is a company that does a lot in Diagnostics lab um Diagnostics Imaging Diagnostics as well as intervention um but I think we do that in Partnership almost always in Partnership and I think real Innovation
(01:14) doesn't come without real partnership um the example I I want to start with today is around tuberculosis um we're a company that's well known in X-ray and CT and everything around um radiology and you know the who a couple years ago made a recommendation that TB screening begin with a x-ray it's cheaper than using uh the spotm test it gives you a much faster on the result U so the idea of screen and treat on the spot the challenge with x-ray uh like most imaging has always been how do you read those x-rays where are all these
(01:45) Radiologists um in Low Middle income countries and let's be honest it's not realistic to send this stuff to the cloud and and get an answer you know you don't have the Broadband I mean you don't have the stability of networks um so we are partnered with a company called cure AI which is Indian company and has a leading um it's not our AI people you know always assume that we're using our own stuff we don't make the best stuff in TV screening so we use cure um and we're doing a program in the Philippines to optimize the throughput
(02:14) with AI screening so one of the other things we learned from the global fund is they've been funding AI for some time uh but they're not seeing an increase in patient throughput they're not seeing an increase in diagnostic they're still having a very high footprint of undiagnosed patients in High TB prevalence areas so we believe that we can be the partner in how to optimize the implementation of AI and importantly here this is the first AI in the world where it is the recommendation that you don't require a physician to read it
(02:46) okay you do not require a radiologist to read it now this is for screening when you get to diagnostic you're using a spotm test that comes from seied if you weren't aware there's other players but it's really seied around the world um and and there you and there you have have it so from our perspective um there's a partnership with a small company there's a partnership with a major fun like the global fund um and there's aspects of how do you really Implement AI to uh achieve better outcomes on the ground that'll be an
(03:13) example that we hope to scale to many other countries but started in the Philippines thank you for sharing that um another thing that I understand that You' have been working quite a lot on is just this data inequity and I wanted to understand a little bit more about how your company is is looking at that and and ways to get on top of that and you know one thing I've been hearing about while I'm here is putting the patient at the center of that and try to equalize the the data that's going into these algorithms so if you could address that
(03:42) that would be really interesting to hear yeah I mean we always worry an innovation that is um first introduced and often tested in the developed countries in the developed Health Systems where may not necessarily be really applicable in low and middle-income countries um and AI is no different right there is a significant dat bias so the example I like to bring up is breast cancer I'm a breast cancer survivor I went through my treatment and therapy during covid in Denmark and one of the National Health Systems and a
(04:09) very high-end health system if you don't know Denmark um but when you look at the again seens does make AI but again I'm going to talk about somebody else's AI um so there's a company called transpara in the Netherlands which is one of the premium AI Solutions in in the EU for breast cancer reading Radiologists around the world um it's a very difficult read and many Radiologists who read everything else don't read breast because it is a very difficult read so you have mamography systems sitting around the world where they're not fully
(04:38) optimized to have the throughput um because you again you don't have anybody to read it so in this case um the transpara AI is a great solution approved in the EU for some time now and is what they've used in this um huge Sweden study that people often refer to but it's not optimized for the Asian Den breast and when you you know think women are not all created different equal the the breast is very different um there's a huge difference in the ability for an algorithm to detect and yet many of our databases that we all use to develop
(05:09) have strong bias in them to the western or the developed world's body right so how do you really do that we've put a lot of effort into U validating that particular algorithm both in the public and private systems in this case um in the Philippines and Indonesia and in Vietnam and there in Vietnam it's with privates um but really you know before you deploy this you need strong unbiased data sets they're very difficult to acquire if we get to it later on we can talk about some ideas around how do patients maybe pay for scanning with
(05:39) their data because patients have a very powerful tool and that's their their diverse data sets um and it's certainly on anonymized data sets but I think I'll leave it there hear what our other panelists have to say yeah does anyone want to add to that or we can move on to different topic what I think um what I would add to it is and by the way it's interesting this is my third day hearing about a radiologist joke and a radiologist in AI it's it's it's interesting how that specific job category um has has has so
(06:11) much implication on AI but um what I'd say is that the way we think about it HP is that when we look at specific verticals Automotive is one example Healthcare is another data and in the world of AI is a is a has a lot of privacy and security implications and um and and the way we think about AI is that um AI deployed at the edge or at the end point allows for a different level of security and and privacy that's unique to the customer unique unique to the patient unique to um the hospital Network Etc and that's how we think
(06:43) about it there are use cases that warrant that and in doing so the AI That's deployed is actually different um they need to use small language models sometimes tiny language models deployed at the endpoint inference at the end point so you have the capability but the data resides and remains um remains the at the edge and it's secured wherever the you know the customer wants it and I'll just piggy back off of that um at sunflower Network you we're using pre-fabricated modular technology to build hospitals starting in Ukraine a
(07:13) program that we intend to scale across the world and I I set that context because I think what some people don't always think about is the applications of AI Beyond just the handling of information which is kind of the classic archetypal use case so for us we are literally building a hospital in giant legoes pieces in a factory in a different country that then gets brought in so you might say okay where's the the the data the an analysis of scans how does that intersect with AI well AI has implications on the built environment on
(07:48) the physical environment on the way that physical buildings and real estate and infrastructures constructed it enables robotics to drive down the cost of building permanent infrastructure and so I'm an optimist I can't help but be an optimist but I think the implications of this new technological development are so much bigger than any of us are even thinking about yeah I you said you want you look like you want to say something go ahead well I was going to jump in from the mental health perspective um for I think context is important just
(08:21) briefly you know what problem are you trying to solve with technology and not the other way around um in the US half of folks with the mental illness received no treatment and of those who do half receive ineffective or treatment that's not evidence-based so there's a there's a huge both access and quality challenge um and that's true internationally globally as well and in our Global Health work it's been really interesting the last six seven years the first topic that Ministers of mental Ministers of Health want to talk about is mental
(08:55) health um which as a psychiatrist um that's been really cool uh to see but um I think you know the the technology needs to be put in a proper context so I'll just say this is you know you need to build an ecosystem a Continuum of Care that that has access and quality built in and that starts with prevention and thinking about you know folks who are experiencing stress distress difficulty sleeping don't need a therapist or psychiatrist but need some added support and in that domain there's a lot what technology can do in
(09:32) terms of peer support uh digital uh uh therap sort of wellness and sort of mindfulness CBT type digital with a tech space coach um and I think that's promising none of there's a lot of products out there um um most of them are not FDA approved in the US context so there's not really a business model to prescribe but that's coming um I think the a second context for the Contin was just thinking about integration and how you embed Behavioral Health in context for people routinely engaged so this could be you know
(10:08) Primary Care uh it's MH Gap or it's collaborative care in the US it's schools um we do a lot of work with clergy who are front lines so training clergy and L counseling um is I think a really powerful example of extend expanding Workforce and overcoming stigma and Technology there um from a Workforce Development standpoint we're getting we're not there yet but um I think Craig mentioned um you know the the role of AI and like a training coach bot to help develop skills and clinicians I think is really promising
(10:48) so moving beyond traditional CME which doesn't work to you know an ambient listening device that's listening to your interaction with the patient or the client and giving you real time feedback hey you missed that did or you know you might ask about this and when you look at um exp like training you know what we've learned in the global South is you can train nonprofessionals to develop deliver empirically supported psychosocial interventions CBT whatever it's effective um but you know one of the issues it takes training and you know I
(11:21) think the technology right now we have apps that kind of deliver static information and or we have text based coaching but I think think sort of as you get into the this idea of a AI bot um that's listening and in real time giving you feedback like the the learning potential there and the development potential is is really incredible yeah I'm glad you mentioned voice as well because that's another method to increase Equitable access because not everybody's going to be able to type or even be familiar with that or
(11:52) they may be disabled and not able to type yeah all I mean all the Technologies we're working with right now are both voice and and tapping um I think Diagnostics is in in mental health it's uh there's a lot of opportunity that also can bring down costs um we're not there yet but there are models that if I have you speak into your phone for a minute one minute tell me how your day is based on the acoustic and semantic quality of your voice um with a high degree in probability we can make up at least a screen for psych itic symptoms
(12:30) depression anxiety and if you add to that um all the passive so data that just based on your speech patterns your activity and sleep and your social media posting which is all right here um you know we can actually detect um uh mental illness a lot earlier now this stuff isn't really scaled yet but um it's coming and that's going to help in across the globe in terms of improving I would imagine with computer vision as well being able to detect for example in a video call People's facial expressions and that of course brings up privacy and
(13:08) security concerns I see Kish over here nodding his head with that so if you want to address that yeah I mean I think when we we look at the evolution of models we talked about voice we talk about video we talked about um essentially all forms of of uh of uh interaction mediums um the notion of multimodal um AI is is coming and and we're experimenting with things around computer use and how do you detect and how do you how do you create an experience that is essentially visual in nature and natural the notion of of
(13:41) communicating with your fingers is is it really should be should should be dead by now but it isn't yet um and I think the and that's where we see the evolution of new form factors so it's it's part of it is the challenges is the physical characteristics of a keyboard and a PC and a device today but we're looking at things like you know what is a what can a what what can a um uh a device attached to your ear what can that do what can a pendant attach to your to your outfit what can that do so they listening devices they video
(14:09) devices they're all multimodal nature and so long as again the data remains secure and depending on policies of an organization if it remains within your premises then you can actually do a lot of things with that in a in a privacy intact manner yeah and the passive wearables as well indeed yeah and we you know the uh since the 60s Paul Ekman did the work around facial expression and the association with different discreet emotions and we've trained therapists in that for decades um including myself when I was in training to recognize you
(14:43) know one is one is a patient help you detect emotion in the room which is such an important part of mental health but with the video now you have facial action coding you can use AI just based on a on a video uh stream observing uh an encounter it's powerful information that can come out of that that can feed into then um both Diagnostics but also house the Therapeutic Alliance and where's this treatment going um I I want to bring us back a little bit I mean of course Tech is not only and Innovation is not only AI it's the
(15:22) Hot Topic right it's the it's the Buzzy topic um here in Davos again uh for like year number three I think um at least um You're Number Four okay some of the audience I haven't been here that many years um you know other topics I I I like what you were saying there about Diagnostics right because when we really think about Health Equity and how do you really you know have people live longer um make Health Care available most health systems around the world public or private do pay for intervention so Universal Health Coverage if you show up
(15:56) with a substantial lump you know it's it's covered and your Cancer Care is your chemotherapy your surgical intervention is covered if you um have a specific uh infectious disease the actual medicines are provided there are fun either it's funded by the Universal Health Coverage or even in low middle- inome countries often philan philanthropy is funding the medicines but the problem is Diagnostics really has not reached a lot of the underserved and that's in high income countries in underserved areas of high income count
(16:29) countries but also in certainly in low and middle inome countries so whether that's a very basic Community Health worker type of Diagnostics Pro potentially digitally enabled um you know metronic Labs does some really interesting work there in Africa as an example or whether that's a more complex Diagnostics with a blood test you know what can we determine from a blood test and do people have access to those things and I mean that's really one of the fundamental shifts in healthcare is to bring diagnostics from an equity P
(16:58) perspective I that's a really important point that you brought up and in particular we think about the fact that there is a 9.6 year globally gap between Health span and lifespan so that means that the last decade in the US it's actually 12.4 years people are suffering from chronic diseases that are non-communicable and so a lot of what you're talking about the early Diagnostics could certainly be a factor I think the other thing is prevention and so you're nodding your head would you like to address how we can use use
(17:29) technology and Innovation to address that and get ahead of it yeah um I part of what in the public health uh sorry your name was is joining I I really appreciated your contributions in the first session um you know if you think about um from a population perspective how do you recognize um early uh folks where things are starting to go a miss and then how do you intervene early in the mental health like in you know recognizing the early psychotic symptoms that can have a devastating impact on the course um of
(18:09) of that person's life but also incredible impacts on the family and on the broader Healthcare System in terms of costs uh you know all the um health care costs associated so I think you know screening technology I'm really excited about how a lot of these Technologies we're talking about can help us reduce the cost of screening earlier recognition and then navigating uh patients and their families to the right solution but it has to be in the context so you can't just have the technology you have to have a place to
(18:41) send patients uh to get the type of care that they need and so that's why I mean I'm very careful to emphasize both the capacity building of a of an ecosystem with the technology to help fac wonder if you could might be able to speak to the fact that there's only about 2% of the global healthc care spend that goes into mental health and yet the Green Berets say that it's a force multiplier to address mental health and that's why they not over invest but they invest heavily in that so I was wondering if you could talk about or any of you could
(19:10) speak to how we might be able to use some Innovation here well Natasha's work in Ukraine I think is a great example where um she has been leading efforts to um train healthc care workers and now chaplain in the military and stress first aid which is an evidence-based intervention that helps um build uh resilience and coping um but also helps recognize when someone needs more uh they need where the distress levels or the trauma stress is so such that they need you know higher level of care and I think you know that's a that's an intervention
(19:48) that works and particularly in crisis situations we used it in the pandemic a lot of our nurses and healthcare workers were experiencing High burnouts and Dem moralization trained 50,000 of our employees in stress first aid and we're been really encouraged by the results I think technology can help again the the technology can help um Implement that at a lower cost and augmented but you you know you still need the human expertise and you need to train people uh I don't you know I haven't seen anything yet where you can just Implement stress
(20:24) first aid with an app but there are apps out there like we have an app we've developed that that will help coach you in stress first aid but um you know there's still that critical translation and I think with all the the sorry to interrupt you go ahead I want to just this is such a a great thread to rund down and John you talked about how technology can be a huge help here but in addition to the technology there needs to be a place to send the patient I think the last variable that's worth considering is also the cultural and social
(20:55) circumstance around mental health and other types of care Dynamics so I grew up with a mother who's a therapist so we would sit around the table and talk about our feelings that was very comfortable you know I've been doing a lot of work in Ukraine I've been to Ukraine eight times since the start of the war and what we've seen is not only is there not the physical infrastructure you know the literal stock is not sufficient to receive people in such a way that creates a positive Association and allows the delivery of effective
(21:21) care but there's also a very different cultural relationship with going out and seeking Medical Care and so as much as technology can help Drive early detection and push forward a lot of the actual medical and treatment uh options at an earlier stage in a more preventative way I think it's a it's a real mistake to view technology in a vacuum and I think it needs to be considered just to round out this point in conjunction with the actual place where the people go the people and the social cultural context surrounding that
(21:53) whole ecosystem yeah that's a really good point Dustin and I'm thinking this morning what Laura was also talking about the climate crisis and how that was going to increasingly displace people and create more issues around sanitation and access to health care so anticipating that we're in an environment that will produce more chaos from that how can we use technology and Innovation to anticipate that and use our healthc care dollars to help people I'll give a really raw answer to this question because it hits quite
(22:24) close to home for me um as I mentioned I've spent a lot of time in Ukraine I've seen the destruction that war brings firsthand uh just last week my family's home in Los Angeles burned down and when you look at the photos of La it looks exactly the same as Ukraine it it is you can't tell the difference and I just had this bizarre realization like okay when a bomb goes off it starts a fire and the fire is what burns out the washing machines and leaves the The Rusted Spoons on the ground the same thing you see in Angeles is the same thing you're
(23:00) seeing in bcha in itan in Western in eastern Ukraine um and what that made me think a lot about is unfortunately war in Ukraine might be the best proxy we have for the climate catastrophes of tomorrow what you see in Ukraine is massive destruction massive dislocation of people massive migration within a country that is placing tremendous stress on the healthcare infrastructure and the Social Services of a region that is now under capacity where before it was over capacity you're seeing a situation where investment
(23:34) dollars state and government Focus has to go towards responding to the crisis itself instead of the health care and the the needs of the people and so I think what's really important and I don't want to front run the next panel too much but what's really important is designing Healthcare infrastructure that is climate resilient and then also acknowledging that the forces of nature are greater than the forces of man and we need to be able to respond in a quick and timely manner to those types of shocks and that's why for us we've
(24:03) identified modular construction technology as a really powerful tool that has not been in my view adequately adapted and applied to this kind of use case I wondering if you could also speak because we have three representatives from large corporations here and you've got a lot of resources to bring to bear if you could address how your Grassroots initiative if there's any lessons from that that the rest of us could learn and apply yeah well uh so I'll give a little bit of my origin story I I come from the the commercial real estate finance and
(24:32) investment world and I was working for a major Global investment development firm uh when on February 24th 2022 I watched Russia commence its fullscale invasion of Ukraine and I sat watching in horror wondering how something like this could possibly happen in the 21st century I I ended up deciding that I needed to do something to help I reached out to every organization asked them how I could help they all said give us money go away I hated that answer I'm kind of a stubborn person and so I got on a plane went over to Eastern Europe and right
(25:08) before I got on that plane I got connected to a Ukrainian couple living in Washington DC and they said great you're heading to the Border we're going to send you supplies so that you can bring them to someone on the border and they'll bring them into the country so I'm sitting in my apartment in Los Angeles all of a sudden I have hundreds of tourniquets traumatic medical wound bandages this is a healthcare room I don't have to say that um show up at my door I pack them into a duffel bag fly them across the world bring them to
(25:32) someone at the border hand them to someone to bring into the country and I felt great the next day I got a video of my bag with my check luggage tag still attached being unloaded all the way by the front lines in hot and that's when I realize we really can make a difference and to land the plan on your question the way we can make a difference is by empowering the local individuals the local community that understands what's going on better than any of us and then by connecting them to global resources and so what we did in the in the initial
(26:03) Inception of sunflower Network before we were focused on delivering infrastructure we were delivering Aid and we delivered uh almost $5 million of Aid by serving as that bridge between Global institutions Global individuals Global High net worth uh family foundations that wanted to help and the amazingly robust as you know network of ukrainians on the ground who were already doing all the hard work they were just choked off from the global flow of resources thank you so much I go back a little bit to ganisha and I know
(26:31) you've your HP has done some work on the future of work and I'm wondering what takeaways you might be able to take that in light of what Justin just said and also what John was talking about in terms of repowering or reskilling people to be able to address some of the challenges in healthcare that we don't have enough healthare workers to do it so are there any learnings that you could take away from the future of work studies yeah I mean um you know and this this sort of takes a perhaps a more horizontal and in the context of future
(26:59) of work and by that I mean we see um we see Healthcare professionals largely as knowledge workers um and then of course there's some who are on the front lines as well so there's that split um what we're doing right now is studying what does it mean in the world of AI what does the future work mean and we split that into two different parts there is the um future worker and then there's the work of the future and and those two warrant separate analysis and you know the future worker tends to be we we view it as sort of a
(27:34) generational shift as we see you know younger um uh folks entering the workforce and their expectations from from a technology perspective and a productivity perspective we've studied that Trend in in the current generation of of uh employees and we see a lot of tension between organizations looking for growth and workers looking for fulfillment so this tension is is very real and so how we how you navigate that and make sure you serve both sort of parties is is really important and then there's the work of the future and the
(28:04) work of the future is a little bit more complicated because it's evolving really fast um just across every sector and certainly Healthcare as well um we have looked at you know the life cycle the Journey of a nurse and a nurse practitioner and what that looks like and and how you can augment that with technology and how that can be a lot more um productive and fulfilling for the nurse um and so a lot of that studying we've done in sort of in uh in specific areas um but I think to me that the future of work construct is is um is
(28:35) is a is enabled a lot by Ai and Tech and I also want to honor the the comments made by my fellow panelists which is it cannot be tech for tech that doesn't make any sense it's very much a human Centric approach um but I also want to put out one other point which is there's a lot of discussion around and I'll go back to the radiologist joke so to speak it's not really a joke but it's it's a thing where there's a lot of these sort of concern around job losses in the short term and what what implications there may be so when we think about the
(29:03) future of work we see humans being um uh superpower humans and I don't say that just by to be cliche because um if you think about how technolog evolved we build technology for ourselves we build it for humans so long as we Remain the center of consumption and the unit of consumptions the way I call it I think we will all evolve and it's going to be very interesting to see how we we gain a whole lot more superpowers and as technology continues to evolve okay one final comment here from Tisha yeah I want to maybe build a little bit upon
(29:36) that and take us to one other topic which is um I would be remiss sitting here at we um where we last year launched the Global Alliance For Women's Health right and when you really think about Health Equity 70% of the health Workforce is female less than 25% of leadership in the health Workforce is female and unfortunately there's a very very small portion somewhere around 2 to 3% of investment in technology for health goes to women's specific Solutions it's really a huge gap but the decision makers are primarily male and
(30:08) are often forgetting that women make 70% of the health decisions in any household right so we think about Health Equity and the application of tech I think we have a long way to go in truly investing in Solutions and making Women's Health a priority um and that will absolutely lift all boats right so it's not about not investing in technology that benefits men but just as an example women have a 75% greater chance of dying of heart attack if they show up in an ed because the signs and symptoms are so different but most Physicians are not
(30:42) trained that those signs and symptoms are so different so Tech can be part of the difference there recognizing um the equity opportunity there I think is also a topic and I know we want to open it up to the audience right so I'm going to leave it there yeah well I just wanted to say one thing before that which is that also I found out that Alzheimer's also disproportionately affects women and globally women actually in developing world are responsible for more of the income than men so it's really significant if you look at the
(31:07) World Bank figure so we need women to be productive members of society um and can I just quickly add to that a comment um I also has to do with race and other types of um um you know the tech a lot of the apps are centered on white experience at least in the US and so so like blackful is an a lot of mindfulness apps blackful is an example of an app that really centers African-American experience and sort of um and uses that and and just the whole design of the app and how it trains people um so it just like you know it's a whole racism and
(31:47) inequity you know that exists and kind of garbage in garbage out um but as we design these apps really you there's the access to them but there's also the um sort of the content and and such so my name is Manoj gani I run a healthcare startup from India Mumbai so especially Tisha you mentioned about the breast cancer thing so I'll just take a step back so India we have recognize oral breast and cervical cancer are the huge ones and now the with the use of non-invasive technology you know these are all you can do a early screening and
(32:25) prevention of that the challenge is when you deal with the not for profits down to get the data and obviously data hygiene Etc they don't have enough money to sustain to do the ground level truth to build the ground truth model so you had a related qu pointer which I wanted to throw it open is how do you monetize those guys without supporting on Foundation CSR and grants Etc but they can be and someone I was talking about tokenization of data etc etc to see that it's a virtuous cycle then you're getting the data it's anonymized it's
(33:00) you know those kind of things I just e yeah it's a very interesting question and this is by no means my idea or seems health and ear's idea but um and there's many people have come with it but um we funded some uh students at um National University Singapore both in the health um medical school and in the business school to look at you know taking from a micro Finance perspective what do patients have that they can potentially pay for for their screening with any type of screening cardiovascular screening whatever it is and could a
(33:34) patient put together be willing to give anonymized data and it is truly possible of their scans the result is available their family history maybe the results of a blood test because a scan alone is not terribly useful for to someone who's designing an algorithm who would buy that and what would they be willing to pay right is this a reality particularly for unbiased data and uh this group of students at four potential payers they looked at insurance companies they looked at governments they looked at Medtech companies and tech companies
(34:04) designing um or doing research and found that three of four of th three out of four of those entities would pay somewhere around €250 EUR that's the value of that data in a full package of anonymized data which is more than enough to fund you know we've looked at it in Africa um with 80 EUR a year you could do very strong Diagnostics on an ongoing Bas basis on a patient population so it's an interesting idea I'm waiting for that like super smart micro Finance um person to figure it out I mean we're maybe not the best ones to
(34:37) figure that out but we'd love to jump in there with somebody to to do that and I've never heard anybody doing it yet but every time I bring it up somebody says yeah I've heard that here I've heard that there so if somebody knows somebody's actually doing it I would love to know that let's talk afterwards thank you super interesting and there are more questions y hi my name is Simon um from clim works very interesting panel and I loved how many positive uh examples were shared that contribute to more Health Equity just a bit from a more
(35:07) provocative angle maybe Tech can also be neutral and what you do with it defines if it's a positive or A negative contribution to Health Equity just making an example if you look at let's say the degree of digitalization of the Healthcare Systems I would assume so that in the First World countries it's a higher degree which is contrasted Maybe by Less digitalization in third world countries I mean this is just an assumption now with AI coming in do we risk now that there is a de decoupling of First World countries producing an
(35:43) even higher degree of quality versus maybe a more stable progression on the third world countries and if so how can we address this I believe this is maybe rather a midterm problem and not maybe a long-term but still something we should think about no I I think that it's a great question and to to be provocative right back uh I think there's actually the opportunity for the exact opposite to happen so in the last panel you guys talked about uh the the bidirectional learning from you know developed economies to more
(36:19) vulnerable situations um I think some of the more wealthy more wellestablished nations are going to be more entrenched in their way and slower to adopt new technology and again I'll just use Ukraine as an example like everything is digitized in Ukraine everything I live in New York City now like I can't go to a bar without having my physical ID on me so the idea that America is in a position to to better utilize data and better utilize technology is just not true from my experience in fact it's the opposite it's the countries that are less
(36:54) developed that are less entrenched in their ways and therefore more willing to take that leap I would argue there's also some developed countries that are doing things differently for example you mentioned Denmark they have a whole patient registry it's longitudinal there's lots of studies coming out of that and drugs are being developed because of uh from breast cancer research and and so forth and fact I just learned yesterday that in China there are AI only Hotel uh hospitals no humans so it's not just the developing
(37:21) World any other questions yes uh hi thank you for the panel um I'm curious to swap two actions uh based on the conversation so if you could pick an initiative that you would start or put efforts or resource towards that would Propel towards Health Equity where do you think the most impact would be just a brief answer from my side would be empowering community health workers um Primary Health Care to do more screening and diagnostic um applying Tech to that uh getting people into the reimbursed health system and I
(37:58) would say scaling a network of highquality modular Healthcare infrastructure that can be rapidly deployed and then rapidly flexed in situations like Ukraine in Northern Israel in Gaza in Los Angeles I mean unfortunately the need is tremendous and we at sunflower Network see a real opportunity on the infrastructure side um yeah I there's some early interventions that we can do for example teaching people how to do meditation meditation free and there's a lot of re research that shows how beneficial that is for our health outcomes
(38:29) yeah I would agree with both and I think tele medicine is it's here now it's been here for a while and there's a lot um it's simple in a way uh um and you know we're using it now to provide like realtime surgical consults from New York to the battlefield in Ukraine or um um we have a teles Psychiatry consultation service that we we offer to rural clinics in Ecuador and I think there's a lot like on the margins it doesn't cost us much um and there's a lot of folks who want to participate and contribute their professional skills um and you
(39:13) know so something as simple as Zoom I think is a is a you know it's hardly technology I suppose anymore but it's pretty powerful in in that in that in a very tangible way the other point for me would be really thinking about um how you equip folks nonprofessionals to um uh meet like lay counselors chws sort of providing behavioral activation other types of treatments that are empirically supported um and I think technology can help there but there's also the stress first aid and we were just in Ukraine last week and Technology can help but
(39:54) you also need you know the the face Toof face I think as well I I I wasn't going to ask any questions since I'm up a little bit later but uh on the question that was asked on the equity issue and the answer you gave and I agree with you that developing countries not entrench in their ways and eager um to reduce the Gap but there's a reason why the mdgs of 199 of 2000 had a goal of Technology transfer and why in 2015 the sdg included techn technology transfer because in case you don't know every developing country right now want
(40:52) thei and all the technology they want to do it they're eager to do it they're ready to do it now but the elephant in the room these are not inexpensive things and when a country is spending $ us per capita on health or 15 or even 300 the question before us today is will a will the explosion of technology in health widen the gap or will it reduce and erase the Gap it's the elephant in the room and in 2030 we will replace the M the sdg and we will still have the goal of bringing technology to the developing
(41:56) country let's not not just put the thing under the rug it's there thank you very much it's a very good point I'm incouraged to see that they're open platforms now that are giving the databases away so it's becoming a little more accessible than it was even two years ago yeah and I was going to thank you for bringing that up I was going to respond but we went on to the next question I have a different view than my than than that of my panelists on this on this topic and I and it share I share the view of the gentleman who just spoke which is um
(42:28) there's a significant there was a conversation I had earlier today about chat GPT simply chat GPT and the cost of um building chat GPD and the the the R&D dollars that went into it something the in the realm of about $6 billion um if we were to build chat GPT from scratch today it would be about 112th that cost the reason why that matters is that who's using the paid versions of Chad GPT and where's that adoption where's that investment happening and there's a there's an affordability element to this so I I I don't buy into the argument
(43:05) that you know when you're when you start later you you have a significant leapfrogging advantage and and you should that's what technolog is all about um but make no mistake the R&D aspect of some of these things are significant the question and the point you made is exactly the thing that I think we need to think about which is does this widen or narrow the Gap and I think it's incumbent upon us I'll tell you some of the conversations we're having um on even large language model development we're talking about in the
(43:31) context of yes we have a US version but several countries in the Middle East are looking to develop their own why because um the cultural aspects the point you made the cultural aspects the nuances the historical perspective all those things matter and so how those things get developed in offshoots of the techn technology that's been developed here is very important so I think I am an internal Optimist as well I see these things as an opportunity to narrow the gap but we got to work on it it's not going to happen on its own yeah it's a
(44:00) very good point so we're gonna have to wrap that but I wanted to thank these fantastic panelists for your participations super interesting insights and also to northwell health dalberg and the health Finance Institute for having us and with that I hope that you take some of these lessons and go forward with some Partnerships to bring Innovation to close a Health Equity Gap thank you