CloudTag Inc (LON:CTAG) Chief Executive Officer Amit Ben-Haim caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss its plans for 2018.
Q1: We are now one month into 2018, what are the plans for CloudTag for this year?
A1: In line with our strategy, as laid out during second part of 2017, we have continued to consolidate the company’s position and focus on the B2B space, hence developing more pilots and clinical trials with health insurance companies and health care providers are pivotal for our business.
We are designing the pilots and clinical trials together with our B2B partners to target specific commercial opportunities. We are excited to be working on a clinical trial with a high end private clinic based in Germany, the aim of the project is to gather insights from patients as well as to test and direct the commercial opportunities for both the clinic and ourselves. We are currently in the process of developing the clinical trial protocol.
Last November, we attended the Medica show in Dusseldorf and were extremely pleased with the response from the B2B client meetings, as such over the course of 2018, we will be attending other B2B focussed exhibitions and events as we aim to both grow our presence in the B2B markets and further build on our pipeline of B2B client opportunities.
To support these B2B discussions our technology development roadmap is focussed on building our Artificial Intelligence team and in particular the machine learning capabilities. This AI will work alongside our current platform and algorithms to both provide constant improvements to the technology’s accuracy and most importantly to identify data insights most valuable to our B2B clients. The market is moving toward personalising data for the end user and as such the machine learning will assist us in delivering more tailor made nutritional and exercise suggestions.
In discussions with medical device and insurance companies, we understand that the most pertinent issue is data integrity and security, as such we have been considering commercial relationship with a company to assist us in developing a specific 4th generation blockchain based technology stack that will decentralise our data transmission as well as its encryption.
To allow us to focus our efforts in the areas outlined above and after taking soundings from market stake holders, we have decided, for the time being not to follow an FDA approval, under 510(K) Class II for our device although some work was done last year, and we have identified the route and the predicate along with the claim for going forward if decided so.
Q2: What are the key drivers for the B2B clients?
A2: Today companies like Fitbit, Garmin and more alike make and sell fitness devices, in the near future, companies like these will need to provide the right devices and be the reason for the consumer’s healthcare premium being discounted.
B2B companies and organisations need to not only work from the most accurate data available, but also identify, sort and interpret the most relevant data points that can enable enterprise clients to better understand both individuals and populations. Secondly, B2B companies need the ability to promote user engagement with their solution to achieve sustainable behavioural change that addresses health problems for long term. To achieve this, they must be able to effectively and efficiently analyse the user’s substantial data sets, how to apply artificial intelligence on big data in a meaningful way that brings real financial benefit to both providers and customers will be the key challenge.
Last year we took the decision to pivot CloudTag and we have changed our focus from B2C to B2B and have kicked off the engagement process with insurance companies, healthcare providers, medical device companies and pharma companies. In the same year, we have completed one single-arm clinical study with The University of Aberdeen and the full report of the study is currently going through peer review; we have also just completed our phase 1 technical pilot with a leading pharma and medical devices company and we are in the process of defining the protocol requirements for phase 2 which will be taking place in H1 2018.
Q3: What is your proposition for the B2B market and in particular the healthcare and insurance sectors?
A3: For life insurance, the increased health risk of NCD, non-communicable chronic diseases, is becoming more and more challenging to deal with the without increasing premiums in a competitive market. The previous business model which included pre-screening customers, risk-premium and annual renewals does not provide the level of engagement and customer retention that is needed. Within this, we are targeting specific use-cases:
• Incentivising and monitoring healthy lifestyle. More frequently insurers, with the assistance of employers, are to try to incentivise healthy lifestyle using wearables and digital programmes to achieve win-win scenarios. However, in this early stage it is yet to become clear whether this is genuinely effective as the results are presumed and not yet proven. For this reason, insurers are still more focused on acquisition and engagement than on reduction in health risk / claims. For this market, we are developing weight-management digital programmes, as a key Diabetes Type II risk factor. We hope to be able to provide the insurance providers with a scientifically proven tool deployable to their members and realise health and financial benefits in the short, medium and long term.
• Early intervention. Over time, people’s risk factors change, and insurers are not always as up to date as they need to be. Being able to monitor key behaviours and health indicators on a regular basis directly from the members’ body means that interventions and preventative measures can be taken earlier, hopefully before clinical conditions materialise and the costs to the protection providers begin to mount.
It is for this reason that we have maintained focus on two specific areas, firstly, our scientific rigour and the emphasis we put on the accuracy and efficacy of our solutions, we strongly believe that a higher level of data accuracy is a fundamental requirement in order to deliver meaningful solutions to both the insurance and healthcare markets. Secondly, Behaviour Change Techniques, BCT’s, that we use in our digital platform, we believe that these can make the biggest contribution to sustainable health benefits such as weight loss. We have already shown how these BCT’s work and their impact in our first single-arm clinical study and we expect to share more on this in the future.
To achieve this, we will spend more time and effort conducting scientific clinical studies with patients to constantly test, validate and improve our technology and solutions, during 2018 we will continue to do so in larger scale and in more global settings.
In addition, and to further boost the company’s capabilities in this field, CTAG have appointed two senior advisors who report directly to the board. One of the advisors is also engaged by one of the largest pharmaceutical and medical companies in the world, he is extremely knowledgeable of our key technology and has vast experience in the area of digital health advisory and medical research with many successful government projects in Europe and global strategy projects. Meanwhile, our second advisor is an astrophysicist with a strong connection to both banking and private sector finance as well as medical research, he will be pivotal in the development of our AI direction.
This pivot to focus on the healthcare market and specifically the early prevention strategies has been validated by some of the industry’s leading companies. As best and most recently summarised in the latest edition of the monthly magazine published by our technology partners and shareholders IMEC International:
“In mid-2016, Bill Hait – global head of R&D at Johnson and Johnson Pharmaceutical Research and Development – said that the company’s long-term goal was to make significant progress towards a world without disease by 2030. His words heralded a trend that became visible in 2017: smart healthcare is shifting its focus from diagnostics and therapy to disease prevention and disease interception. While disease prevention mainly focuses on stimulating (healthy) behaviour, disease interception implies capturing a disease before the first symptoms occur and developing therapies applicable in such an early stage of the disease process. Both prevention and disease interception require personal digital phenotyping – the use of digital and wearable technology to track health parameters and behaviour over an extended period of time so as to identify risk factors and triggers. To turn this vision into reality, technology innovation is key.”
Q4: Any surprises for 2018 for CloudTag Inc?
A4: Without going into too much detail, we are working on an innovation for our user engagement tools and are building a cryptocurrency token into our platform. The proof of work for such a token will be the energy expenditure output for each individual. We see this being directly integrated with the insurance providers and being a powerfully engaging feature.
