Podcast Startup

EP 24 – Abhishek Shah – Wellthy Therapeutics – How Can My Health Get Better

02 Sep 2019Posted By Michael Waitze

Host

Michael Waitze

Michael Waitze worked in Global Finance for more than 20 years, employed by firms like Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, primarily in Tokyo. Michael lived and worked in Tokyo from February 1990 until December 2011. Michael always maintained a particular focus on how technology could be used to make businesses more efficient and to drive P/L growth. Michael is a leader in the digital media space, building one of the biggest and fastest-growing podcast listener bases in the region. His AsiaTechPodcast.com show has listeners in more than 170 countries and his company, Michael Waitze Media produces some of Asia’s most popular podcasts.

Guest

Abhishek Shah

Abhishek has more than a decade of healthcare experience, having previously co-led an early stage fund as a venture capitalist, and held leadership positions in his healthcare family businesses. He holds a B.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Georgia Tech and an MBA from the Indian School of Business (ISB). He co-founded Wellthy Therapeutics in 2015 with the mission to reverse, prevent and control chronic conditions in India and Asia through clinically validated digital therapeutics.

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In this episode, Michael Waitze speaks to Abhishek Shah, the Co-Founder and CEO of Wellthy Therapeutics. Wellthy designs clinically validated behavioral interventions to help people change their behaviors and reduce their risk of chronic disease. This concept is enabled through the intersection of technology and clinical outcomes helping users to actively manage their health risks.

Abhishek explains the journey of insurance companies from providing health insurance at a static price, to dynamic pricing, to integrated personalized services. This is a stage many insurers are heading towards, catalyzed by recent HealthTech developments. Instead of only pricing risk, incumbents are starting to influence risk by taking customer needs and behavior into account and offering products that help people live a healthier life. Partnering with InsurTech and HealthTech startups is often the key in offering those new services as insurers are struggling to develop these concepts in-house.

Michael and Abhishek further discuss health literacy. This is an important topic in this region as chronic disease resulting from lifestyle, such as type II diabetes, are on the rise in Asia and are developinging into an epidemic. Health literacy is often neglected and the two discuss how people can be educated at scale about their health. In order to enable people to better manage their health, they need to be educated first. This is where tech comes into play. Using scoring and gamification to motivate users and use data to offer personalized insight and advice.