DatosX Accelerates Innovation by Validating Digital Health Technologies
DatosX partners with companies across the health tech ecosystem to generate the data needed to validate digital health tech without the high costs and extensive timelines of clinical trials.
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The Challenge
When Robin Roberts worked at the global pharma giant Novartis, he would often participate in a recurring conversation with his colleagues. “We were having a very difficult time understanding how well a digital health technology would work in a specific use case,” he says. “I’d be sitting in conference rooms over and over again trying to solve the same problem.”
The options presented to Roberts and his colleagues were unsatisfying. They could either test a new digital health technology in conjunction with an extremely expensive and time consuming clinical study or they could make a guess. But the stakes in this guessing game were high. Some of the projects they were considering leaning into could cost the company millions of dollars in investment. “Often we choose wrong,” says Roberts. “We needed to develop a way to be able to test things in a time-efficient and cost-efficient manner.”
Roberts was frustrated by the inefficiency of the system and by the lack of hard data. “In an industry of scientists and rigorous clinical trials, it struck me as unacceptable that we didn’t have the ability to collect data on digital health tech in a systematic and efficient way in order for us to bring something useful to patients or healthcare providers.”
Origin Story
Roberts began tackling this problem in 2018 after launching The Biome at Novartis in San Francisco, an innovation lab exploring ways technology can address big health challenges. Working at the intersection of health, data, and technology, Roberts quickly became aware that vetting healthcare technologies wasn’t just an issue faced by big pharma but also healthcare systems, startups, and VCs looking for data to support investment decisions. He then made tackling this gap his main priority. In 2023 Roberts left Novartis to co-found datosX Digital Health Labs — uniquely dedicated to systematically testing digital health technologies.
In order to build a successful system to test digital health technologies, Roberts relied upon leadership skills he developed while serving in Naval Special Warfare. Roberts thought his career at Novartis was over when he left the company 14 years ago to become a Navy SEAL. However, his career in the military was cut short after an injury. He returned to his previous job at Novartis as a global trial leader but with new potential. “I came back with a new set of skills, primarily around leadership,” says Roberts. (Other newly acquired skills, such as deploying explosives, were less transferable).
“One of the things you learn very quickly in the military is how to lead on things that you may not be an expert in, but you need to become one very quickly,” he says. A mentor soon pushed him to take on the challenge of separating the financial and scientific management of trials. It was a problem he had flagged to his mentor, but not one he expected to solve himself. Yet he learned quickly, becoming an expert and leading a team in the first organization he developed and ran, the Global Trial Budget Management Organization.
To address the unchartered territory of testing health technologies in a cost- and time-effective manner, Roberts and his team began by considering the biggest challenge. “We didn’t have access to the end users, whether they were patients or healthcare providers,” says Roberts. However, they realized that healthcare systems had the access they needed. “We went on this journey to start talking to healthcare systems and figuring out whether they wanted to be a part of this solution,” says Roberts. Although they found that healthcare systems were interested, the organizations needed to have more incentive to give their time and resources toward the effort of testing technologies. “The value proposition needed to be refined for all parties so that executing the study helped them achieve their objectives along with collecting this important data.”
What They Built
Roberts and his team realized that the monetary piece of the equation wasn’t of primary importance to healthcare providers. They were more interested in understanding the data on how effective the solution is and solving relevant problems in their organizations. Hence datosX designed a value proposition that covered the expenses for the healthcare system in executing trials, allowed them access to the data, and aligned with problems they were already focused on solving. “For them, it becomes a risk-free opportunity to test the solution that they would have wanted to test anyway and understand how well it works in their specific system,” says Roberts.
DatosX has since built a consortium of leading US healthcare systems that they consider as partners in testing digital technologies. A large part of their process involves matching the right healthcare systems — their study partners — with their clients, which they call Study Sponsors. Their sponsors are diverse: it could be a digital health tech company collecting data for regulatory submissions or new claims, or a pharmaceutical company testing an internal incubator or weighing whether or not to develop a partnership with a digital health company. Once a match is made, datosX works with the study partner to develop the protocol and timeline for the study before it is executed and then analyzed. The end result is a decision point that provides sponsors with data-driven information to refine a solution or pivot to an alternative.
Recently, datosX partnered with Banner Health, a large healthcare company, to test a wearable device. Although it had been used successfully in a particular context, the company needed information to see how it would work in a different space, with oncology patients. Like many other products in the digital health field, a full clinical trial was not needed to test this wearable. “What was needed was a simple test to see how well it works,” says Roberts. DatosX and Banner Health ran a study with several dozen patients. “We better understood how patients and healthcare providers react to that particular wearable,” says Roberts. “That’s the kind of information that an organization needs,” he adds.
Although datosX’s first projects were executed under the umbrella of Novartis, they have been functioning as an independent company since October 2023. The benefit of scaling a tried-and-tested concept into a new venture is that “we’re not a new organization that hopes they can fit in the marketplace and hope that it works,” says Roberts. “We’ve gone through the process of figuring out how it is going to work best for healthcare systems, life science companies, and digital health tech companies,” he says. Currently, datosX has over a dozen healthcare systems on board. “We’re constantly growing that list,” says Roberts.
Take Away
DatosX helps make the health technology field more agile and efficient and it’s a service that has the potential to impact the overall wellbeing of the health technology field. DatosX has solved an industry-wide problem and in doing so has removed the problematic choice many companies face: take a wild guess or spend huge amounts of money and time testing a digital health technology. With datosX’s expertise, connections, and partnerships across the ecosystem, “Now this is a problem that you can solve,” says Roberts.
Join us in welcoming Robin Roberts and his team at datosX Digital Health Labs to our global community of Health Transformers.
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Published: Jan 11, 2024