My #BEMUSA2020 daybook: Day 4-5 in New York

* Disclaimer: these are my personal views and thoughts, I am not representing any organisations mentioned in this blog.

Tuesday June 7th started early with a 5 am checkout to catch our flight from Atlanta to New York. I was honoured to be invited as part of a small group to meet the CEO of J&J for an inspiring lunch discussion & Q&A with executives at their global HQ in Brunswick.

We admired Bill Hait’s and his colleagues’ openness and passion, and heard how the work of our famous Belgians, Paul Janssen and Paul Stoffels, has served as an inspiration for many people. For more than 130 years, J&J have been creating value through innovation. In 2021 they invested $14B in R&D, are selling products in 175 countries, and have more than 1 billion daily consumers of their products worldwide.

Bill began by pointing out that J&J was once a startup too. He explained how innovation has changed the trajectory of healthcare, including a 60% increase in life expectancy, and a near normal life expectancy with HIV. He also talked about robotics and digital surgery, targeted therapies, personalised healthcare solutions, and long-acting treatments. He also highlighted how medical devices and technology have become an increasingly interesting aspect of health provision, utilising technology such as 3D printing and other digital solutions, and how medical technology is playing a part in areas such as infection prevention, amongst others. The essential elements required for success are a transformative potential, science & leadership within the team, a killer experiment, and realistic yet fair deal terms. I couldn’t agree more with this assessment, and we will surely follow up with Zeger Vercouteren and colleagues in the innovation ecosystems J&J uses.

Over lunch we had an informative follow-up discussion about partnering between startups and multinationals like J&J, the importance of data science and health enabled by digitalisation.

Shortly after we moved to the prestigious Harvard Club in Manhattan where I was part of a panel on ‘Data Driven Healthcare Excellence’ together with Ryan Steinberger from Pfizer, Liesbeth Ceelen from Biolizard, and Varun Ramdevan from J&J, and well moderated by John Baeckelmans from FIT.

For my part, I explained how Belgium is positioning itself and aligning with the European Health Data Space (EHDS). Belgium is setting up the Health Data Authority (HDA) to facilitate better and faster access for secondary use of health data. We all need to move to a data-driven preventive healthcare system, where health data in all its forms, is uniformly, transparently, and securely available. This will lead to qualitative, affordable, preventive, and targeted care for every citizen. These are very exciting times for health data science. One of the major challenges, however, is how we can simplify health data structures by connecting the dots and making health data FAIR - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. There were many good questions during the panel discussion, and this continued at the evening reception and during the whole trip. The need for a Belgian HDA is clear, and many people were engaged with the subject.

At the evening reception at the marvelous Loeb Boathouse in Central Park, I followed up with so many people with different backgrounds and skills. This really was a fantastic delegation with many compatible talents from both the US and Belgium. The need and appetite to collaborate on data science in healthcare was very clear.

I also ran into another inspiring friend and entrepreneur, Zhong. He explained how he is currently scaling up Deliverect, a ‘unicorn’ with a fantastic story. We discussed an idea I have with my friend and partner in crime, Filip Pattyn. Filip and I recently started a new company, FAQIR Institute. The company assists life science and healthcare companies with data science, supporting and training employees with FAIR data skill sets, setting up FAIR data projects, running awareness and strategy sessions, calculating the ROI of these projects, and driving forward opportunities to demonstrate the value of FAIR data. This is exactly what we are now doing to assist the set-up of the Belgian HDA. FAIR data and data quality is at the core, hence the Q in the middle of FAIR which makes up for FAQIR. Ultimately, we envision citizens will become data faqirs, self-sufficient and in control of their own data. Soon we will also launch the FAQIR Foundation, where not only patients but any citizen will have better access and control over their health data in a secure and informed way. Imagine secure and GDPR compliant federated analytics across 440 million health data pods in Europe, and later global. The citizen controls his/her data and you can run real world evidence on this patient network in a transparent, secure and consented way … wouldn’t that be great!?! A lot of people are very excited about this and we are lining up interested patient advocacy groups, life sciences companies, health care professionals and tech partners. Feel free to contact me or Yves Claeys if you want to know more about this very exciting initiative.

Zhong inspired me to move faster and think big (including starting in the US) from the beginning. The timing for all FAQIRs is now. The non-for-profit FAQIR Foundation will become the global health data science facilitator to securely access, share and use health data, whereas the FAQIR Institute helps with services where needed. We are lining up our first interested US customers and investors as we speak. Energy levels were pumping and the pitches were received extremely well.

On Wednesday I switched lanes from the life sciences and healthcare track to another area I love, start-ups and scale-ups. We started with two panels in “Nail it before you scale it: Building structures and partnerships to develop a sustainable, international business model and accelerate growth”.

Firstly, venture capitalists hared tips & tricks, followed by a second panel with Pieter de Leenheer, founder of Collibra, a Belgian unicorn with a US footprint, and Noah Hayes, GM of Deliverect USA. The panel gave some good tips and openly discussed the challenges for EU companies moving to the US. Finding money is rather easy when you have a good product and team. They shared some good advice for attracting and retaining talent, including in the US, while scaling. I fully agree with Steve Jobs quote used by Pieter “A players hire A players, B players hire C players”. Go for top talent and nourish them as a coherent, solid and motivated team. The discussion afterwards was lively, and a lot of business contacts were made.

New York gave me many good ideas and advice, including the input from two unicorn start-up founders. My head was spinning.

In the evening, we had the next networking reception organised for the Flemish participants by Flemish Minister-President Jan Jambon at the fantastic Morgan Library & Museum. We continued our discussions, and I was again very happy to meet Murat Aktihanoglu  and Catalina Daniels from the New York Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator (ERA). I introduced some of the start-ups to Murat. They did a quick pitch and received feedback. I hope they will benefit from the accelerator program as I did in 2018. ERA helped me enormously in setting up marketing and communication materials for the US market, having a clear pricing model & value proposition, teaching me to pitch, and above all to talk the local language and sales lingo. I will surely come back to NYC and ERA to scale FAQIR! With their mentorship and support, we will dare to go big, much faster.

It was also very good to see that the Flemish Minister-President Jan Jambon and FIT are supporting Flemish start-ups to go to the US to scale up. Murat, who is working with many start-ups in multiple countries, explained that the quality of Flemish start-ups is very high, but they need more help in sales & marketing to scale faster. Perhaps we should think about some ERA-like or ERA supported sessions with local mentors in Flanders before the start-ups expand to the US.

Despite being very tired, I still went for a quick wrap-up snack with Arvid and Dominique.

Friendships were built, seeds for partnerships and funding were planted and it will be very challenging to do all the follow-up. Back in the hotel I fell asleep in seconds in preparation for the next two days in Boston!

Key takeaways #BEMUSA2022 Daybook 2/3 Visit to New York

• Multinationals also started as a #startup & want to collaborate in data science.
• Think big/global from day 1! - Accelerate the FAQIR community!
• European Health Data Spaces are crucial for a safe HealthData future where trust of all citizens is key.
• Great to be able to help to set up the Belgian Health Data Authority! We are going to nail it with all stakeholders!
• A players hire A players, B players hire C players. Hire the right people and care for your team!
• We have very nice unicorns we should be very proud of! #Deliverect #Collibra Let's build more impact together!