We’re investing in the future of healthcare

Author: Tom Moon

At MMC, Healthcare is a key area of research and investment. I’m excited to invest in start-ups that will reshape the way I practised medicine.

I began my career as a doctor in the NHS and invested approximately 10,000 hours treating sick patients at several hospitals in the UK. It was incredibly rewarding but often frustrating as cutting edge advances in technology rarely penetrated the inefficient and manual world of bleeps, fax machines and paper. Today, healthcare is in a state of profound change and in the decade ahead, I think developers will have a greater impact on the future of healthcare than doctors. At MMC, Healthcare is a key area of commitment for us and I’m excited to be investing in start-ups that will reshape the way I practised medicine.

Healthcare disruption is at a tipping point

Machine learning applications in computer vision, natural language processing and pattern matching offer profound new opportunities.

The provision and consumption of healthcare is at a tipping point. At MMC we see significant opportunities to reshape healthcare delivery to make it more cost-effective, more efficient and higher quality. Several factors underpin this:

1. Emerging technologies unlock value: Machine learning applications in computer vision, natural language processing and pattern matching offer profound new opportunities for process automation and cost reduction. Emerging technologies will disrupt multiple stages of a patient’s journey, from prevention and diagnosis to treatment and monitoring.

2. Healthcare systems feel the strain: Ageing populations, expensive new treatments and rising patient expectations are pushing healthcare systems beyond what is achievable with current approaches. Advances in technology offer the opportunity to reinvent processes and to scale existing resources to meet rising demand.

3. Stakeholders seek innovation: While healthcare systems can be slower to embrace change, healthcare leaders are increasingly willing to explore innovative solutions. in October 2018, for example, the UK Secretary of State for Health published his ‘Future of Healthcare’ vision with advanced technology at its core.

4. A bold cohort of entrepreneurs want to make a difference: In our ‘State of AI 2019: Divergence report’ (highlights deck) we identified that more of Europe’s AI start-ups — one in five — are focused on the Health & Wellbeing domain than any other sector.

We’re investing in multiple areas of the patient and practitioner journey

In digital health we seek to support entrepreneurs in a range of promising areas

We’re a research-led venture capital firm and seek to understand deeply the intersection of emerging technologies and sector dynamics, as illustrated by David Kelnar’s extensive work on AI. In digital health, we seek to support entrepreneurs in a range of promising areas — including:

Digital diagnostics — including machine learning-enabled radiology & pathology diagnostics and analytics
Digital therapeutics — including applications to prevent and treat mental health conditions
Patient monitoring — such as remote monitoring to facilitate treatment in the community
Communication & collaboration tools — such as clinician-to-clinician and clinician-to-patient communication applications
Administrative & analytics tools — including natural language processing applications for mining patient notes and reports
Computational biology — tools that enable applied life science researchers to leverage the data they collect

We’re backing Europe’s innovators

If you’re the CEO of an early stage digital healthcare company, get in touch to see if we can help accelerate your journey.

We seek to back the best healthcare entrepreneurs in Europe and we’ve already made several investments in the sector — including patient monitoring company Current Health, prescription management company Echo (recently acquired by McKesson) and elderly care platform Elder. The MMC team includes digital health operators (former Babylon CFO), as well as clinicians (two medical doctors), and we’ve helped our companies with issues ranging from FDA regulation to US expansion and access to ‘lighthouse’ customer accounts. If you’re the CEO of an early stage digital healthcare company, get in touch to see if we can help accelerate your journey.

In the coming weeks, look out for regular posts as we publish our thoughts and theses on the topics above. We welcome your perspective and feedback — reach me on Twitter at @tom_moon. If you’re the founder of a digital health start-up, get in touch to see if we can help you achieve your ambitions.

This post originally appeared on MMC Writes.