How's everybody doing? This time around we are talking to — Ahmed Abdulla, CEO of Digipharm.
Ahmed is an experienced Health Economist with several high-impact publications and supports the Advanced Tech Advisory Board at UN/CEFACT
Chris: Greetings! Thanks for doing this interview. Let's get right to it. Your website states: "Accelerating the transformation to Value-Based Healthcare" - can you elaborate on this mission you have?
Ahmed: We help healthcare organisations pay for healthcare and related technologies like drugs and devices based on how well they work rather than how much is used by the patient. Value-based healthcare is all about increasing healthcare activities that provide value to all and eliminating activities and technologies that do not provide the expected benefits for the health system and patients.
Chris: What problems do you solve and how?
Ahmed: Globally we have health systems and patients facing big issues around affordability of good quality healthcare; mainly due to increasing costs, aging populations and limited budgets. This means that healthcare organisations need to make the daily choice of what they can afford to give patients in terms healthcare services and treatments. This was massively impacted further by the recent pandemic with many countries around the world still recovering. The current business model in healthcare takes a fee-for-service approach, this means, for example, when a patient receives a dose of a drug this needs to be covered by payer (governmental body, insurance or the patient themselves) whether this treatment provides benefit to the patient or not. The problem here is that funds are often wasted on treatments or services with no benefit for the hospital providing care or the patient. Value-based models enable us to set up a payment infrastructure that only rewards positive outcomes such as improvements in the patient health condition, and where there is no benefit to the patient there would be a reduced cost or no cost at all. By working in this way health systems can protect their budgets and are able to provide the most innovative/latest treatments without worrying about the ever-increasing wastage they currently face.
We have developed a platform to manage and process value-based agreements using exciting technologies such as blockchain and smart contracting called REIMBURSE. In addition, we have a patient portal called DIGIHEALTH where patients are able to report how well therapies and services work for them. This is a key aspect of value-based healthcare that is not well known to patients and public at the moment and we aim to change that. One unique aspect of what we are doing is developing the DIGIHEALTH ecosystem to be more than a reporting tool. Building on the credibility of implementing our platform with well known healthcare organisations, we want patients to also manage their own DIGIHEALTH by being able to keep their medical records there, benefit directly from monetising anonymised data and accessing additional health solutions (we have a 50% profit share with patients!) that can improve their quality of life in general. DIGIHEALTH and REIMBURSE are driven and powered by DIGIHEALTH TOKENS ($DGH) which is a Swiss FINMA regulated utility token, this has recently been listed and is available to purchase on MEXC.com
Chris: I can see that you have the NHS in Wales, UK as a partner. Was this partnership difficult to acquire? To what do you owe it to?
Ahmed: We work in an extremely complex and sensitive area within healthcare and implementations are not as straightforward as deploying a patient application or a service to one party alone. Since there are multiple parties involved in these value-based agreements we need to make sure everyone is satisified with our approach, the contract itself and the implications of the results once processed. So yes, it is difficult to obtain such partnerships but we are confident in our ability to deliver on the promise of making every health system we work with better and more sustainable.
I would say we owe it to having a strong network in the field plus having a solution that users really need, there would be no point in us working with partners and health systems if they did not see the benefit of using our platforms.
Chris: Tell us about your team, please. What are your backgrounds? How you all got together?
Ahmed: Our team has an extensive background in health economics, reimbursement and procurement which places us in a great position to keep advancing and shaping the value-based healthcare space. We have a combined experience of more than 140 years in the healthcare space at organisations like the NHS, GSK, Roche, 3m, Fischer, Academic organisations and health regulators. Our leadership team have met through previous working relationships and we have made sure that we have the best possible team to deliver change in a very risk-averse industry.
Chris: What is the Reimburse system? How complicated is it?
Ahmed: REIMBURSE is our patent pending platform that handles all the performance-based agreements for health technologies and services. As an independent third party platform, REIMBURSE smart contracts process and manage performance data regarding these treatments and services on behalf of the contracting parties since they are all incentivised to present performance data in a way that Is beneficial to them. REIMBURSE uses blockchain to create a transparent information sharing infrastructure that everybody can trust whilst benefiting from the elimination of the administrative burden related to linking data points to contract/pricing conditions. The backend of the system can be very complicated, or it can be simple, it all depends on what the agreements look like and how many data sources we need to work with to collect the appropriate data. What our users like about REIMBURSE is that the interface they engage with is really easy and intuitive to use and that is definitely a key priority for us.
Chris: You got so many various awards. Is there anything that you can unite them all?
Ahmed: We are pleased to receive these awards and be recognised for our great work but we know the most important thing is fixing the problems healthcare is facing. Health systems are on the verge of collapsing in many places around the world and our biggest prize would be to make this transformation to value-based healthcare as seamless as possible whilst bringing patients with us every step of the way.
Chris: Thanks! Where can we follow you?
Ahmed: The best place to follow us for our latest updates is Twitter and LinkedIn
Digipharm Twitter:
Digihealth Twitter:
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