The Journal of mHealth Vol 1 Issue 2 (Apr 2014) | Page 39

Interview with Peter Ohnemus at dacadoo

Interview with Peter Ohnemus
at dacadoo
This issue sees the first in a series of interviews with
leading figures from the world of mHealth. As Digital
Healthcare evolves we ask leading CEOs, Clinicians,
Industry Innovators, and Developers to share their insight
and opinions of the mHealth industry. We ask what it
takes to develop, deploy, and integrate successful digital
health solutions that have the potential to revolutionise
the way in which healthcare is delivered.
As part of our investigation into the
‘Definitions of mHealth’, in this edition, we talk to Peter Ohnemus founder
and CEO at dacadoo, a company pioneering the delivery of digital-prevention and lifestyle-navigation platforms.
We ask him to share his experience of
developing and bringing to market a
leading mobile digital health solution
and to provide his thoughts on how the
dacadoo model could potentially alter
the way in which we all perceive health.

into business process re-engineering,
and satellite communications… the last
company I built, was Asset4 where we
developed a very significant algorithm
that was used to rate and benchmark
companies based on their water usage,
energy usage, legal claims, etc., so really
looking for ‘quality’ data on the World’s
4,000 largest public quoted companies.
This taught me a lot about real time
information and how to value and rate
real time information.”

A serial entrepreneur and leading figure in the field of data-analytics, Peter
Ohnemus, founder and CEO at Swissbased dacadoo has made a career developing innovative solutions that collate
and analyse large datasets in real time,
in order to extract meaningful insight
and realise tangible outcomes. Speaking to The Journal of mHealth from
the dacadoo headquarters in Zurich
Switzerland, Peter shares some of the
insights and philosophy that has led to
the creation of his latest company.

After selling Asset4 to Thompson
Reuters in 2009, Peter chose to apply
his considerable knowledge and expertise of real-time data analytics to the
growing sector of mhealth and related
lifestyle management, the result of
which has been dacadoo.

“I have been in high-tech all my life
having been involved with four [different] companies that went public, and
always dealing with big data.” Peter tells
us. “I originally sold IBM mainframes,
before moving to build Sybase, a database company, in Europe. I then went

“After I sold Asset4 to Thompson
Reuters I started thinking about what I
would like to do next? I have five daughters myself and I was concerned about
people not moving. When I mean moving, [I mean] keeping an overall active
lifestyle and so I began to wonder that
if there could be a way where you can
show people their health in an easy,
understandable, way then you would
have something that people can navigate within their life. If you then combine that with what we call “SoLoMo”

(Social, Local, and Mobile), then you
have something very powerful, because
you can follow people’s lives in real
time on a smartphone.”
“… We have more people dying now
of sitting than of smoking. Obesity in
America is clearly defined as a disease
by the American Medical Association
(AMA) and in an article published by
The New England Journal of Medicine
it has been suggested that one of the
most important parts of ‘Obamacare’ is
the provision under paragraph 2705 of
the Patient Protection and Affordable
Care Act (ACA) where companies can
reserve 30% of their overall healthcare
spending for digital prevention and lifestyle navigation… Being an entrepreneur all my life I believe instead of just
watching and complaining, that you do
something about it!”
Staying true to those original convictions, in a relatively short period of
time Peter has managed, along with the
team at dacadoo, to develop, and deploy
an extremely innovative platform that
has already proven itself to have the
potential to significantly alter the way
in which we perceive and manage our
individual health. The result of this
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The Journal of mHealth