Gloria Seibert, founder and CEO of Temedica, on VatorNews podcast

Temedica develops digital patient companions for complex, chronic conditions

Steven Loeb and Bambi Francisco Roizen speak with Gloria Seibert, Founder and CEO of Temedica, a company that develops digital patient companions for complex, chronic conditions.

Our overall goal is to understand how technology is radically changing healthcare: the way we screentreat and measure progress and outcomes. How we’re empowering the consumer. Whether we’re creating productivity that drives economic costs down? And how tech advancements change the role of the doctor. 

Highlights from the interview:

• Seibert was inspired to start Temedica because of her grandfather, who had multiple sclerosis, causing her entire family to suffer. While the therapy for MS has improved, everything else has stayed the same: patients have just very few opportunities to visit a doctor and what they get is very standardized and not customized to the patient. Her idea was to use digitization to support those patients and give them this individual support along their patient journey. Temedica was founded with the aim of supporting patients with personalized medicine.
• Temedica build digital companions for patients suffering from various diseases like multiple sclerosis, psoriasis and cancer. The company uses the apps to generate real world evidence data to get a very granular understanding of how the patient is doing. And we can individually tell the patient what is good for them and what he or she should avoid, but also learn a lot from the patient cohort which is using our apps, and derive new insights and evidence for the entire life science value chain.
• Temedica's apps aren't aimed at improving the outcome for patients; its builds apps to give patients an opportunity to better take care of their health. Sometimes they also have an impact on the quality of life and can reduce side effects, but this is not the main goal. The main goal is to generate patient generated data, and contribute to the latest science. 
• Rather than having one app that covers every condition, Temedica brands a different app for each condition it covers. This is also what  patients deserve because nobody wants to be treated with a one size fits all approach. Temedica wants to give patients the opportunity to be treated individually, and to support personalized medicine. While a one size fits all solution might be better economically, it's the most sustainable approach to also engage the patients in the long run.
• Temedica partners with pharmaceutical companies for some of its apps including Roche for multiple sclerosis and Bristol Myers Squibb for psoriasis. They get access to the real world evidence data Temedica gathers, which gives those pharmaceutical companies insights they usually don't have, as it is usually collected by a clinical trial. Telemedica gives companies like Roshe and Bristol Myers Squibb an opportunity to understand how therapies are happening on the patient side, how they are being perceived, how they are being consumed, and how effective they are, and the burden of disease.
• The company decided to tackle the European market before the US and Asia because it's quite easier to scale within Europe. The company sees ourselves as an international player, and wants to expand to the US, Canada and Japan in the future, but it has so much expertise in the European market so it will focus their first.
• Germany is far behind the US when it comes to how medical data are being gathered and also stored. The country had the ambition to to have an EMR database on patients' smartphones, but it's still in the early planning stages.

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