Aside from myself, Skolkovo imported several other Americans who focus in this area, including Missy Krasner, entrepreneur-in-residence at Morgenthaler Ventures; Jack Young, Director of Qualcomm Life’s digital health venture fund; Jonathon Feit, CEO of Beyond Lucid, a very cool mobile health company that won this year’s DC-to VC contest; Mike Keriakos, President of Everyday Health Kristin Baker Spohn, Director of Business Development at Castlight Health, and Leon Peshkin, a professor in BioMedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and who is originally from Russia himself. Pascal Lardier, Director of Health 2.0 International, also attended from Paris.  As previously mentioned, Esther Dyson and Milena Adamian also played key roles.  Milena was also the conference organizer on the US end and is herself a Russian-born physician who has been operating in the US healthcare industry for many years.  Her Russian counterpart in the conference, Polina Kolomenskaya of the Skolkovo Foundation, made the American delegation feel very much at home and, together, she and Milena and their team put on an excellent event.  And they stuffed us full of food and drink and sent us home 10 pounds heavier.  I am guessing I am going to have to pay customs on that extra baggage!

There were also many notable and senior level Russian conference participants representing industry (telecomm, pharmacy, Medtech, IT), government and venture investors (including ViaMedix, the country’s first dedicated healthcare venture fund), as well as a large group of aspiring Russian digital health entrepreneurs. It was a room of about 150 very smart and experienced people engaged in a common quest to improve the healthcare systems of their own countries and the world.  About half the room spoke English and the other half Russian.  It was the first time I ever participated in an event where there were behind-the-scenes translators feeding the information into my ear on a device, UN style.  It made for some pretty funny moments, like when the Russian translator was speaking about a sensor that used urine as a marker and apologized profusely mid-translation for saying the word “pee”.  Hilarious.

The primary foci of the discussions were on technologies and ideas and business models that have or might work in the US and where those might or might not fit into the Russian healthcare ecosystem.  There was a specific discussions bout whether it was better for The Russian healthcare system to develop its own solutions or import them from the West.  There seemed to be significant bias to the former yet less experience creating such solutions, posing a bit of a conundrum for local entrepreneurship.  There was also much discussion of the burgeoning global health market opportunity that the Russians clearly want to get in on as much as American companies do.  As I listened to this I was reminded of some of the comments I heard from the CEOs of Medtronic and Stryker about how they were focusing less on product innovation and more on bringing proven products to new markets. I think they will not find themselves alone trying to capture those non-US healthcare funding streams.