MedTech World Magazine | Newgevity: The birthplace of longevity

For decades, longevity has been treated as a problem to solve later in life. We invest in managing chronic disease, slowing decline, and extending lifespan once damage is already visible. Thorsten Waloschek, a MedTech executive and CEO of NeoPredics, with more than two decades of experience in maternal and neonatal healthcare, argues that this framing is fundamentally backwards. Longevity, he says, does not begin in midlife or old age. It begins at the very start of life.

Waloschek calls this shift Newgevity: a life-course approach to health that treats pregnancy, birth and early childhood as the foundation of long-term resilience. “Long term health is not something that begins in midlife or old age,” he explains. “It is established from the very beginning of life, when biology is most adaptable.” In that window, small changes can shape health trajectories for decades.

His conviction comes from experience. Across leadership roles in newborn care, including 20 at Draeger Medical and NATUS Newborn Care, Waloschek saw the same pattern repeat Healthcare had become extraordinarily good at reacting to emergencies, yet far weaker at anticipating them. “We had incredible technology to manage the crisis,” he recalls, “but we weren’t doing enough to predict and prevent problems before they became critical. Every adverse outcome felt like a missed opportunity.”

That insight led him to NeoPredics, where the focus is not on automation for its own sake, but on clinical decision support that helps clinicians act earlier and more precisely. NeoPredics develops predictive algorithms for maternal and neonatal care, built around real clinical decision points and designed to fit into existing workflows. The goal is simple: deliver the right insight at the right time, in a way clinicians can trust and use.

Trust is not a slogan, it is a design requirement. “Technology only has value in healthcare if it earns the trust of clinicians and fits naturally into clinical decision making,” Waloschek says. Rather than building black-box models, NeoPredics prioritizes interpretability, workflow fit and real-world validation. In practice, that means tools that translate data into clear guidance, earlier monitoring when needed, preventative treatment when appropriate, earlier discharge if safe and timely escalation when risk is rising.

NeoPredics’ work is grounded in clear clinical use cases. Its first solution, BiliPredics, support newborn jaundice management by forecasting bilirubin trajectories, helping care teams intervene earlier and reduce avoidable and costly readmissions. The company has also developed PreFree, a prediction tool that flags risk of severe adverse outcomes related to preeclampsia, early enough to support timely intervention. These are exactly the moments Newgevity is about, moving from rescue care to prevention. At the same time enabling reduction in length of stay whenever possible.

Waloschek is blunt about the limits of prediction without action. “Prediction without action is just anxiety,” he notes. A risk score alone does not improve outcomes. What matters is whether the insight arrives early enough, is understandable in seconds, and clearly guides what to do next.

Despite the stakes involved, maternal and pediatric health remain structurally underfunded. Waloschek points out that only around 2-3% of global MedTech investment f lows into this space, even though it touches every human being at their most vulnerable stage. The reason, he argues, is not lack of impact, but misaligned incentives. Returns from early intervention unfold over years, while investment cycles tend to chase short-term wins. “It’s not just inequitable,” he says. “It’s economically shortsighted.”

The consequences are generational. Poor outcomes in pregnancy and infancy increase lifetime disease risk, and shape the health of the next generation. Conversely, earlier optimization creates a compounding effect, where resilience carries forward.

If Newgevity were adopted as a guiding principle across healthcare systems, it would represent a paradigm shift. Early life would be treated as strategic infrastructure, not a niche specialty. Prevention would become proactive and data-driven, guided by individualized risk rather than population averages. Care would be longitudinal, with insights from pregnancy and childhood informing decisions later in life.

“The technology largely exists today,” Waloschek emphasizes. “What we lack is systemic commitment.”

Newgevity is not about abandoning older people, everyone deserves care at every stage. It is about building stronger foundations from day one, so more families get the start they deserve.

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