M&A’s in digital health: Livongo – Teladoc merger from Frontiers Health’s perspective


Over the years, Frontiers Health has always shed a special light on such topics as scaling-up and M&A in digital health. In particular, on occasion of our 2019 global event we shaped a dedicated panel named “So you’ve reached scale – how did you get here, and what’s next?”. That discussion panel was created as continuum of previous years’ panels themes “M&A as tool to scale” and “Opportunities for large investors”. We feel the utmost importance to discuss and share the right ways of scaling-up to succeed in the health innovation space.

In this context, all eyes are on a recent operation, labelled as the deal of the year, which has produced an unprecedented ripple effect in the digital health market – the merger of two giants, Livongo and Teladoc, resulting into the creation of the largest virtual care operator in the global market (and here we are talking about 70 million of combined user database). The alliance of the two virtual care market leaders, estimated around $37 billion, is being called highly strategic and is expected to generate a higher quality healthcare due to the combination of data-driven insights in chronic conditions management and strong innovation expertise.

We are glad to go back to Frontiers Health 2019 where we enjoyed a keynote speech of Zane Burke, CEO at Livongo, on the role of the digital health in combating the global chronic condition. Zane Burke started by stating that the crucial thing for him is to change healthcare and make it about people and actually bring it to the people leveraging digital health instruments. Our team fully supports this position and we are sure that the merger will play a very significant role in acomplishing this mission.

Roberto Ascione, CEO at Healthware Group and the Chairman of Frontiers Health conference comments:

We see this merger as a huge step ahead for the whole digital health industry. It demonstrates the scaling power of M&A and I believe we will see sustained activity of this nature moving forward.
At Frontiers Health, we will continue to fuel digital transformation of the industry as well as create a favourable environment for scaling-up solid solutions by nurturing deal-making opportunities

We are proud to share other cases of M&A related to Frontiers Health. Running back to our 2018 conference, we hosted a very insightful fireside chat focusing on the acquisition of Noona, a Helsinki-based developer of a cloud-based mobile service designed to capture cancer patient-reported outcomes (PROs) by Varian, a leader in developing and delivering cancer care solutions, whilst in 2017 we hosted on stage key people from Roche and mySgr presenting in a double keynote the acquisition of mySugr by Roche, with the aim to form an open platform for digital diabetes management.

In true Frontiers Health spirit we are working hard on the agenda of the forthcoming Global Hybrid Conference that will take place on 12-13 November 2020. Join us to discuss hot topics and meet key players in the health innovation space and follow our updates on the conference’s website and social media!

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