Video Transcription
Sam Oddsson 00:01
Sam, so good afternoon. My name is Sam Oddsson, and as mentioned, I'm one of the two co-founders of Sidekick Health, and it's a great pleasure to be here with you today to tell you about my company. We are a digital therapeutics company whose mission is to transform disease management with a digital platform. As you know, health care today is broken in many ways, and personally, I clearly remember the tipping point for me when I was working as a medical doctor at an outpatient cardiology clinic in northern Europe's largest teaching hospital in Sweden, where I had a patient in my office. He was visiting six weeks after a near-fatal heart attack, right? And my job was to, you know, oversee the treatment, and I knew that we had just a little bit of time allocated, so I diligently went through, you know, the patient's condition, taught him about these methods, and emphasized that, you know, if you really wanted to avoid another heart attack, you would need to comply with all of these things. And I'll never forget this moment because after the session, I looked outside the window and I saw the patient lighting a cigarette. Now I clearly remember how I, you know, sunk down in my seat, and I thought, you know, my first thought was, you know, this is hopeless. But then I realized that the patient was much more engaged with his smartphone than he was with me. And it just dawned on me that, you know, for holistic patient journeys, we need to go digital, and that's where the name comes from. So Sidekick is kind of the patient's own little helper, right? So if we now fast forward about 10 years from this moment, then we have built up a strong position as a leader in the digital therapeutics market, which is projected to be north of 20 billion in the year of 2028, which is, per se, not surprising because if you think about it, the conditions that are driving the majority of health care costs are these chronic diseases that are lifestyle and adherence-related. And then, yeah, just for orientation, we have grown to 300 full-time employees. We have seen 75% revenue growth per year over the past four years, and we will be profitable next year. And the way I see it is that we are uniquely positioned at kind of the intersection of health care, life sciences, and digital health. And when I say uniquely positioned, what I mean by that is that we have partnerships with five of the world's 20 largest health care companies, we have the world's most prescribed digital therapies that have now been prescribed by more than 15,000 physicians and hundreds of thousands of treatments. And yeah, I'd like to use the following minutes to tell you a little bit more about our approach, the highlights of it, how we differentiate with our platform approach and our evidence-based methods, where we have clearly been able to show both improved outcomes and cost of care reductions. And then I'll wrap it up with a couple of case studies to bring some color to it, and some take-home messages at the end. So let's go. So how have we gone about all this? The approach has been building a highly scalable platform where the patients access tools and behavioral support through their smartphones, through apps, and it's very often in combination with medication or devices. Then there is a care team portal for care teams, and what's unique is that it's all cloud-based and AI-enabled, and we are able to deploy fully regulated software as a medical device prescribed digital therapeutics on our platform. So one of the unique things is, you know, being an internist, seeing that most patients have more than one condition, right? We always aim for a broad platform approach. And I'm proud to say that we have the broadest platform approach when it comes to disease coverage. We have over 20 therapeutic areas that are already commercially live, and we have the capabilities to adhere to both regulatory and data protection requirements, of course, but one of the unique things is, yeah, our defensibility because what we have under our belt is that these programs are truly proven to do what they're supposed to do, improve different types of outcomes and lower cost of care. And we've published 35 scientific publications to date, which is very well appreciated by our partners. And you know, as a chief medical officer, I'm obviously very proud of this, and I could talk about this for hours, but for the sake of time, I'll move on, but I'm happy to follow up on this. Now, the way we go about it is that we deploy these programs across three synergistic business units. We have strategic partnerships with the largest pharma companies to support them through clinical trials and commercialization. We have partnerships with payers like Elevance, which is also an investor in the company, the largest health insurer in the US. They insure 48 million Americans, right? And they've seen, in short, very strong ROI using our products. And I'll get back to that. And as has been covered during this conference at LSI, on the European side of health insurance, the reimbursement floodgates are becoming open, meaning that countries like Germany now have that DECA regulation in place, and we have the world's most prescribed therapies on the Diego market, prescribed by doctors, so we get reimbursed through insurance. So just a couple of case studies, as I promised, to bring some color to it. Here are some concrete numbers from our Elevance partnership. So I'll just name a few as an example. When Elevance has patients with cancer, they naturally want to support them and both ensure high-quality care, but also not induce unnecessary costs. And what we have seen is that if their patients get access to Sidekick, we see a 39% reduction in ER visits compared to matched control from their own databases, and for like more specific, the cancer chemotherapy side effect-related admissions have gone down by 60% in the intervention group compared to matched controls. And you know, it's easy to do the math on the ROI for Elevance, which then leads to them now scaling this up quite rapidly. Other case studies include our work with Lilly, just one example. So we have this partnership with Lilly on breast cancer, where Sidekick has a digital companion that goes along with one of the drugs for breast cancer, and we are tackling the risk of discontinuation due to side effects, and we recently published a paper on this. Now our technology readily connects with medical devices, and I've had some very good discussions during the last days on that note, and just to show you how it works, here's an example. So Ipsomed produces these auto injectors for a range of drugs, including the GLP-1s, and we combine our products with Ipsomed products, and we integrate them, and that then opens up an opportunity to provide a much more holistic patient journey. You know, with this, we can identify unmet needs in the patient journey, like poor medication adherence. One of the things with these injectors that people use at home is that there is, like, fear of needles, there is anxiety, and so forth. Of course, all wrapped in a lifestyle change program as well. So the sky is the limit now when it comes to the digital transformation of health care, and then, just to, like, wrap it up in one summary, take-home slide. And we do truly differentiate. And I think our track record shows that clearly.
Sam Oddsson 09:23
We have a strong and growing recurring revenue base. And how do we go about that? I mentioned we have partnerships with five out of the 20 largest health care companies out there, and in addition, we have the world's most prescribed digital therapies. And to give you context and some numbers, this is being prescribed by more than 15,000 physicians repeatedly, and we are now up to hundreds of thousands of treatments. And obviously this doesn't just happen by itself. So the approach and the background to all of this is the broadest platform approach I mentioned. There are multiple point solutions out there, like companies providing a solution for one condition, but typically our partners don't want to work with those types of companies. Plus, then you are not able to holistically capture the patient because, again, from my internal medicine days, I know that most patients have more than one diagnosis, right? I mentioned the proven track record of improving patient outcomes and cost of care. I wish I had more time to bring more color to that, but I just refer to our publications on that front. But last, but definitely not least, and this is very important, it's not about creating a digital solution that is complex and only meant for people with high health literacy and high health numeracy. I experienced firsthand when seeing patients that most patients actually struggle. So you have to have a behavioral approach. So we employ behavioral economics and gamification to keep patients engaged and retained. Now to build all this, we need time, and we need amazing talent, and we have both 10 years of experience and 300 full-time employees. I mentioned the revenue growth, which has been very pleasant over the past four years, so growing 75% steadily per year, and profitable in 2025. And now reading into the market, we have also become a consolidator. So we have acquired two companies successfully in the market, and we provide our partners the ability to scale broadly, scale at speed, with a modular approach and so forth. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. You.
