Q:  Tell us a bit about yourself and your professional journey. 

Career-wise I am currently an investor working with several private funds doing venture capital and venture debt, including a fund called Abundance Behavioural Health that invests exclusively in digital health projects. 

I came to investing after starting a career in business brokerage/M&A and then founding, scaling and exiting several start-ups. The joke in my family is that after my third company my wife said, “I never ask for anything but please, no more start-ups” and I didn’t know what else to do to stay close to the start-up world so I became an investor.  

For 2024 I have an exciting new “Systematized VC Fund” I’m launching in Abu Dhabi with Salim Ismail of Exponential Organizations. We will be investing only in companies that meet the criteria to have exponential potential as set out in his books. We will then match them with coaches and consultants from the Open ExO community to help them realize their potential. 

On the personal side, I live in Canada, have been married for 34 years (by listening when I get asked for things), have 5 adult children, and live the Canadian equivalent of the bi-coastal life splitting  time between Vancouver, BC and Nova Scotia. I’m currently doing a late-life doctorate in Systems Psychodynamics at The Tavistock in London which doesn’t have a lot to do with my professional career but that I find incredibly interesting. 

Q: What do you see as the biggest challenges in digital health implementation? 

A. From an investor standpoint, we look at the problem through the lens of immunity to change. Immunity to change is when someone outwardly commits to change, but inwardly struggles to follow through on the commitment. This can be individually or across a group system or organization. There are too many reasons for this to do justice to briefly but a few things we are following now include the ideas: 1) AI is progressing so quickly “Why bother going through all the hassle now when things are changing, and improving so quickly, and I’ll just have to do it again in X months/years”; 2) it is so easy to build an app or digital solution and make claims that there is a lack of trust in users and more importantly health professionals who might recommend them and 3) lack of consistent international standards and rules for approval, reimbursement etc. These challenges are not unique to digital health but that doesn’t make it any easier to scale.  

Q: What are the biggest opportunities? 

We are biased because it is where most of our investment is going, but we believe digital therapeutic (DTx) video games represent the biggest near-term opportunity. Within this opportunity there will be prescription games and “OTC” ones where people can self-select. Gaming is the most popular form of entertainment worldwide, it is widely available to anyone with a cell phone and therefore has the potential to scale exponentially. I was just in Delhi, India and had a demo of someone playing a very promising DTx game on a $ 7 smartphone. 

An area we are also focusing on within DTx games is the opportunity to add or combine objective diagnostic tools and assessments into games, sometimes as the only therapeutic purpose. Remote Therapeutic Monitoring (RMT) etc. can often benefit from information obtained from having a person engage and interact with a game in ways that wearables are not able to do.  

Moving from reimbursement-based medicine to evidenced-based medicine is a major focus for us. The data collected can have tremendous value and has the potential to make the games free for patients and players, potentially removing the challenge of reimbursement and cost. As an example, imagine 10,000 players of a game for PTSD, Depression, substance abuse or controlling anger (4 indications we are working with). The aggregated data of all those players can be anonymized and then using blockchain for health data sovereignty and AI to interpret the large data sets patients/players will be able to be paid for sharing. 

Finally, we think that specialization or niche opportunities that address a specific indication or even better, a specific use case are the biggest opportunities. As an example, our most recent investment was in a company called Middle Way Games based in Vancouver which is making games to help people with emotional control or regulation. What sold us most however is that the initial launch use case is focused on the corrections industry to help prisoners deal with anger issues. This extreme focus has allowed them to partner with experts, thought leaders and large companies who can help them launch successfully. I don’t want to downplay the importance of the problems anger causes everywhere – in homes, schools, workplaces etc. but the idea is to solve specific problems in big ways and then expand over time. 

Q:  What advice do you have for anyone looking to get into digital health? 

A: The first piece of advice I would give is to become a student of digital health. I met HITLAB because once we identified digital health as an area of interest, I went looking for the best education and training opportunities. Based on my research I took the Columbia/HITLAB Certificate in Business Excellence with a specialization in Digital Health. I have also joined multiple associations and organizations (like Breakthrough One), read continuously, listen to podcasts, watch webinars, go to conferences etc. etc. 

The second piece of advice is to remember the idea of “Who Not How” and never ask how to do something but rather who is already doing it and/or can help you do it and then find a way to work together. 

I believe we’ve accomplished a lot in digital health in a short period of time because of these two ideas. 

Q.What is your 5-year plan? 

A: Keeping the answer to digital health specifically I hope we will have been part of launching the largest dedicated platform for digital therapeutic video games who have directly launched games for at least 10 key indications that were identified as having the greatest potential to positively impact the maximum number of lives. In 5 years we will support another twenty games by third-party developers/companies. Beyond DTx games we are also working on several digital health projects related to ending addiction and within 5 years the goal is that they positively impact the lives of 10 million people negatively impacted by addiction.