In our latest Interview Series, HTN speak to commercial officer, Jonas Hjortshøj from Liva Healthcare, about the importance of personalised healthcare and the work they have been doing with LloydsPharmacy.
Could you tell us about your organisation?
Liva Healthcare is an innovative health tech company headquartered in Copenhagen and London. We offer scalable digital health coaching for people living with chronic conditions and lifestyle-related challenges such as obesity, prediabetes, type 2 diabetes and heart disease. The company was founded in 2015 by the team behind the popular health information portal NetDoctor.com.
Tell us about yourself.
I’m originally an economist and I am interested in what makes people tick. My job is based around adding value to patient’s lives, looking at organisations that we could partner with in the health management space to help make an impact in this market.
I am interested in the way that I can utilise technology so that it can make it a more personalised experience for the patient. Digital is the key enabler in making healthcare personalised because we are able to create a more personal experience for healthcare institutions. A number of healthcare problems such as obesity can only be solved if you integrate digital pathways in the mix.
How can technology help personalised healthcare?
Digital is the pathway to personalised care. We are able to create personalised services via more data and when we link them up with like-minded peers. Covid-19 has been a huge accelerator for the health tech industry by three to four years in the matter of six months. The pandemic has driven change.
By utilising data we are able to understand people faster and better, it is a more direct way of understanding a person. We gain a snap shot of a person and can then begin to build interventions. We are trying to merge two worlds – personalised data formatting and health coaches that sit over live video that make the concept come alive for the person. Our aim is to create a more personal and scalable healthcare intervention.
Talk us through the work that Liva are doing with LloydsPharmacy.
They are the first pharmacy to deliver a medicated weight loss programme nationwide. They will be providing access to the treatment plan, consisting of appropriate medical interventions and support, and access to Liva Healthcare’s digital health coaching programme – delivering truly personalised coaching to patients who are living with obesity.
The medicated weight loss service offers weight loss treatments alongside regular consultations with a trained pharmacist to help maintain weight loss. This will be supplemented by free access to personalised, online health coaching through Liva Healthcare’s digital programme. We offer patients the opportunity to select their own health coach to support them on their weight loss journey. The coach will deliver a video consultation, followed by weekly coaching interventions through the Liva UK app where patients can engage one-to-one with their coach, track vital metrics within nutrition, exercise and lifestyle, and interact with peer-to-peer support groups.
To qualify, patients must have a BMI of 27 and above with a weight related co-morbidity or a BMI above 30. The initial pharmacist consultation includes discussing the patient’s current health and recording information such as heart rate. The pharmacist will also discuss how patients should take their medication.
How has Covid-19 impacted the work that you have been doing over the last few months?
We are constantly looking at the way we use data to make it more personal, faster and scalable. We have been able to ramp our data game. Covid-19 has accelerated our industry – things have needed to be completed via digital. Public opinion has changed, for example, the diabetes programme within the NHS – NPD has opened up the self-referral of patients and losing the cap of 20% that goes through digital providers. The way it works is that we have a contract set up with the face to face provider and a cap of 20% of the patients that could come to the digital provider, that cap has now been lifted. This favours providers such as us quite a bit.
