IN CONVERSATION
In Conversation with Bronwyn Le Grice Mansi Gandhi
In Conversation provides a glimpse into the life of an ‘outlier’ — an exceptional person going above and beyond to improve outcomes in their field. We speak with Bronwyn Le Grice, Founder and Director, ANDHealth, Australia’s only dedicated digital health accelerator.
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passionate digital health commercialisation advocate with more than 20 years’ experience under her belt, Bronwyn Le Grice needs no introduction. Her name is synonymous with digital health commercialisation, and under her leadership, ANDHealth has worked with over 550 emerging digital health companies to drive commercialisation of their technologies. Bronwyn has worked across the health technology sector spanning commercialisation, venture capital, capital raising and industry advocacy. She founded ANDHealth — Australia’s only digital health commercialisation organisation — with a specific focus on digital medicine and digital therapeutics, in 2017, in collaboration with a consortium of industry partners. ANDHealth’s unique cooperative commercialisation model has led to significant growth within Australia’s nascent digital health sector and continues to be a driving force for the development of sovereign capability in evidence-based, regulated digital health technologies. In 2021, Bronwyn was named the recipient of the Victorian Pearcey Entrepreneur of the Year Award for contributions to
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Australia’s technology sector, and the 2020 BioMelbourne Network’s Most Valuable Women in Leadership Award. Here she reflects on innovation commercialisation, exciting developments in digital health and challenges ahead.
Bronwyn, could you please summarise the focus of your current work?
ANDHealth’s purpose as an organisation is to accelerate the commercialisation of Australian digital health technologies. We support digital health innovators and entrepreneurs to take their technologies from idea to scale-up and international market entry. We do this through a series of programs that are funded by both government and industry which allow us to support Australian innovators in the space. All of our programs are tailored to the specific challenges that digital health companies — versus medical devices or biopharmaceuticals technologies — face as they commercialise. In the past four and a half years that ANDHealth has been running, we have supported over 550 Australian digital health companies to drive the commercialisation of
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their technologies. It is encouraging to see both the number of new technologies and the maturity of those technologies is consistently increasing with ANDHealth’s support.
What are the major hurdles facing healthcare commercialisations?
Within the digital health sector, we are seeing that policy structures, as in many sectors, lag the types of technologies that are trying to reach the market. We see really interesting digital health interventions which have shown that they can significantly improve patient outcomes in clinical trials but lack any clear framework to secure reimbursement to drive commercial-scale uptake. This means that, once these companies have secured regulatory approval, they really are dependent on their ability to find a paying customer that sits outside of a traditional reimbursement pathway in order to get to become a sustainable business. In the past couple of years, we have seen significant improvement in the Australian landscape, including the Therapeutic Goods Administration’s guidance of Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) in 2021, which
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