Jae-Won Shin, medical doctor and CEO of ‘Mobile Doctor’.

Hello everyone! It’s the Humanscape team. :)

At Humanscape, we have advisors who have expertise in digital healthcare, medicine, law, and also in other fields.

We are planning to interview many more advisors soon. Through these interviews, we plan to share information about how Humanscape advisors give help to the project and also provide a fresh perspective on how advisors view the Humanscape project.

The first interviewer is from the Department of Family Medicine at the Seoul National University Hospital. Jae-Won Shin is also the CEO of ‘Mobile Doctor’. ‘Mobile Doctor’ has created the essential app that many mother’s use, ‘열나요’.

1. Hello, please introduce yourself!

Good evening. I am the CEO and a physician who runs a startup called ‘Mobile Doctor’. I guess you could say that I am an entrepreneur with a physician background. (laughter)

2. Thank you! First, we are curious to hear how you decided to become a part of Humanscape as an advisor.

Well, I used to work at ‘Digital Healthcare Partners”. DHP is an accelerator group made up of physicians and specialists that support healthcare related startups. During office hours at DHP, I was introduced to Humanscape.

I believe that the Humanscape project can change the systems in place in the future. It is a project that is worthwhile. Therefore, I volunteered to become an advisor. Having more than 3 years of experience in the startup industry and with my background in the field of medicine, I have confidence that I could provide help as an advisor.

3. The ‘열나요’ service that you operate handles disease related big data, what made you interested in them?

Frankly, collecting patient data wasn’t the primary goal of the business. I wanted to improve a situation where a child that developed a fever overnight wouldn’t have to struggle to find an emergency room. Consulting was the first solution I had in mind. However, it was difficult to implement this idea because of telemedicine and consulting fees.

Instead, I thought it would be better to provide parents with a reason for the child’s fever: how to alleviate these symptoms with a countermeasure backed by scientific evidence. This requires a huge amount of data, and we now have more than hundreds of thousands of individual data that can be utilized to plan and create this service. Data got naturally accumulated over time as we keep on developing the business. There will be a lot of things that can be done with it today.

4. Then what value will the data hold that Humanscape obtains from patients with rare and incurable diseases?

Although Humanscape will develop as a platform for specifically rare incurable diseases for now, Humanscape will also handle a variety of other diseases over time.

First, this platform has a lot of interests in public sector, as it is designed for the relatively few patients and the diseases that have not been getting much attention. Since the number of patients suffering from rare incurable diseases is so small, it creates difficulties in developing innovative services and drugs. It is still worthwhile however to collect data and patients to try and solve the problem in the situation mentioned before.

Humanscape can be applied to more diverse diseases beyond rare incurable diseases. For instance, modern diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. Current medical data are all generated from EMR from hospitals. However, the state of the patient is not managed at all before and after admitting to the hospital. I believe that collecting these data and researching it with existing data can produce a great synergy. We can discover new facts that we didn’t know of about the diseases mentioned before.

5. Overseas, there is a similar service called PatientsLikeMe. With comparison to this, what are the strengths of Humanscape?

PLM is a good platform, but it relies solely on patient’s voluntary participation. In the early development, there was a lot of enthusiastic participation, but there was no compensation to voluntary participation which questioned the sustainability of it. Despite its fame, it couldn’t achieve great success because the platform relied too much on patient righteousness and voluntariness.

The strength of Humanscape is its individual right to information. When a person who needs information pays, the compensation goes back to the person who provided the information. Humanscape is a medium, not a hegemony. In this regard, Humanscape has the potential and competitiveness in the market as it complements the disadvantages of PLM. This could be probably being said as the major reason for becoming an advisor at Humanscape.