Investments in digital healthcare spiked in 2021, but funding has since dropped dramatically.
Bill Taranto, president of Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, tells MobiHealthNews what interests Merck when it comes to investing in digital health and what health technology companies need to focus on to garner venture capital funds in 2023.
“So our investment thesis is kind of broken into sort of three parts. The first is that we have this sort of concept that data is currency … in the future healthcare market. And so we want all of our companies to be sort of data companies, generally speaking.
“The second is that point solutions don’t work in healthcare. We think that it really needs to be interconnected, where companies work together to try to bring a more integrated solution. So we look for companies that help us think about that integrated solution.
“Then finally, we start with a use case. It might be something Merck’s trying to solve. For example, they want to identify more patients, or it’s something else in healthcare that we’re trying to solve, like … how do we prevent stroke and heart attacks? But the theory starts with the use case, and then from that, what we say is, ‘Well, can we find a digital health company that helps us solve that use case?’
“But the problem you run into with digital health is that there’s no single company that can solve 100% of that problem. So, what we try to do is identify something we call an anchor tenant – a company that can solve a big piece of that use case – and then we try to just make that investment.” Read more.
