Skip to main content
EPISODE #7
Episode 7: Innovation in Times of Uncertainty
August 31, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented unprecedented challenges and, at the same time, a unique opportunity to embrace digital health solutions. Responding to COVID-19 requires swift and innovative thinking, and although digital health has been on governments’ radars for decades, progress has been slow.

Is the pandemic an opportunity to address the longstanding gaps in health technology? Will it motivate governments to procure and distribute innovation more efficiently? Or will buy in become a greater challenge due to the increased uncertainty that we are all experiencing?

In this episode, Inder Singh, Founder and CEO of Kinsa, and Dr. Sacha Bhatia, Chief Medical Innovation Officer at Women’s College Hospital, join Ross Wallace to discuss digital health care amidst the pressures of a global pandemic.

Inder Singh is the Founder and CEO of Kinsa, a public health company with a mission to stop the spread of contagious illness through earlier detection and earlier response. Prior to founding Kinsa, Inder was the Executive Vice President of the Clinton Foundation’s Health Access Initiative. In this role, he helped two million people access lifesaving HIV, malaria and tuberculosis medications by negotiating lower priced drugs and diagnostics in 70 developing nations. He also holds five academic degrees from Harvard – MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology, Harvard’s Kennedy School, MIT Sloan and the University of Michigan.

Dr. Sacha Bhatia, Chief Medical Innovation Officer and F.M. Hill Chair in Health System Solutions at Women’s College Hospital studies the appropriateness of care, digital health innovations and health service design. Dr. Bhatia leads rigorous evaluation of digital health tools to move new models and policy approaches from theory to implementation, evaluation and spread, and scale across Canada. Dr. Bhatia is an award-winning cardiologist and he received both his MD and MBA in Health Care Administration from McGill University.

Read the transcript here