The Patient-Centricity and Digital Innovation Session at Frontiers Health 2019, which I had the great pleasure of producing and hosting, with the support of the Frontiers Health Team and in particular Elena Pirofalo, was standing-room only. The topic is of great interest and the panel was quite diversified, with 7 speakers living in as many countries and representing patients, providers, industry, start-ups, digital consultancies.

A special shout-out to  Open Project Diabetes for being a truly patient-driven initiative with results. Thank you Saskia Wolf for leading the way for us at this session.

Each member of the session contributed a quote of his or her key messages. Thank you to each speaker for your very sincere participation, which helped maintain the attention of the audience, despite the overflow conditions. As regards the three day conference in its entirety, bravo to Roberto Ascione, Luigi Pavia, Antonietta Panella for the professionalism at Frontiers Health and the resources deployed. And it was great to meet up again with friends Eugene Borukhovich, Fredrik Debong, Paul Tunnah, of the conference committee.

For myself,  Denise Silber, founder of Doctors 2.0 & You, « Two very different new tools are furthering  patient-centricity:  1) patient-included congresses are  bringing patients and clinicians together at important moments 2) VR or Virtual Reality therapy, which requires seeing from the patient’s perspective, in order to produce relevant content. »

Saskia Wolf, – OPEN team. « OPEN is a patient-led, international and multi-disciplinary research project which examines what academia, industry and people with diabetes can learn from each other towards the goal of making artificial pancreas technology available to everyone. » Visit our website: https://open-diabetes.eu

Rhea Mehta,PhD, Co-founder Bowhead Health. « We believe the future of health data management uses blockchain and smart contract technology to enable people to own and manage their data, promoting empowerment and the consensual sharing of diverse, real-time, real world data with researchers. »

Simon Ip, – Digital Comm. LEO Pharma A/S « To be patient-centric means to put the patient first and to get them involved in the process as early as possible. Concerning the relationship between patient-centricity and digital health, technology is a tool that helps us better understand the patient’s need and come up with better, more efficient and personalized solutions. »

Elena Pirofalo, – Head of Experience, Healthware Group « People are the engine of transformation in healthcare. Supporting people and patients in their journey towards being more empowered is where digital health can be very effective. This is why we believe in needs-driven innovation, producing things that people need to solve real problems and create actual value. »

Towa Jexmark – M.D. Ramsay GDS. « Digital when possible – physical when needed. » We need to develop new services seamlessly for patients and integrated into a digi-physical world.

Luigi Capani – Innovation- Roche. « A movement is forming to help people facing severe diseases, beyond providing great medicines and diagnoses. We are genuinely exploring fundamental human needs to develop services that are personal, available globally, sustainable. Everyone deserves to live their best life. »

And thank you to Melania de Luca for helping us during the session with the slides and the photos.  Denise Silber