Mobile health company WellDoc's former chief strategy and commercial officer Chris Bergstrom has joined the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) as an associate director in the company's healthcare practice. Bergstrom left WellDoc, where he remains an investor, at the beginning of 2015 but served as an advisor for some months afterward.

As a member of WellDoc's founding team, Bergstrom was instrumental in building the company and its prescribable and reimbursable digital interventions for diabetes management. Among other things, Bergstrom was responsible for implementing the company’s business model.

At BCG Bergstrom will help clients in the firm's healthcare, technology, consumer and other practices develop strategies and launch businesses in digital health. Bergstrom has been working in digital health for about ten years and during that time he said most of the large companies, especially those in medical devices and biopharma, have taken a wait-and-see approach to it. 

"It's either been a perspective of disbelief or simply a mindset that 'we don't understand the approach we can or should take in digital health'," Bergstrom told MobiHealthNews in an interview. "There have been a few exceptions. I was observing over the last 18 months -- 2014, but especially 2015 -- as the year that a lightbulb went off at the C-level... they are now accepting that this is a revolution and something that they can't and should not ignore."

Bergstrom says these executives have made the mental commitment and they recognize that the era of the widget in pharma is ending.

"The good news here is we are going into a multi-decade wave of digitization across all of healthcare and that's something that is truly investable," Bergstrom said. "This is not a fad or a flash in the pan."

Bergstrom noted that when large companies are faced with big strategic decisions like those described above, they reach out to companies like BCG. BCG tapped Bergstrom because it has recognized that digital health is going to be important for many of its clients.

BCG will offer its traditional management consulting services for digital health, but it will also begin helping clients with product development and incubation. Bergstrom says the firm is in the process of adding hundreds of technologists, entrepreneurs, business leaders, venture architects, designers, product managers, and engineers to help clients take their digital strategies to market. Digital health is one key focus for this new initiative, Bergstrom said.

BCG is also planning to invest alongside some of its digital health-focused clients as they launch these businesses to share their risk and to demonstrate their own commitment.

"I will focus on, not just solving any particular client's problems, but also on how BCG can tackle industry-wide problems and challenges that affect most of our clients," Bergstrom said. "We are still at a point in time where the systemic industry challenges are really the big hurdles. We've got phenomenal small companies with great ideas and great products, but getting them into wide distribution and business models is still a big challenge. Some of those issues are fundamental awareness of what digital health is capable of... standards and interoperability... and things near and dear to my heart, like [efficacy] ...and payment and distribution models."