The healthcare industry is often overlooked for entrepreneurs. Even though it’s an area in need of a major overhaul. The amount of regulations and lengthy sales cycles makes it a daunting prospect for anyone who wants to set up a business in the industry.
And as we see incubators like StartUp Health focus solely on health pop up in the US. Tueday’s Summer of Startups Demo Day presented four teams addressing problems in healthcare.
While Helsinki remains the hub for startup activity in Finland, three young entrepreneurs from Turku are aiming to make life for nurses easier with NurseBuddy. Their goal is to make reporting between managers, nurses and patients more efficient with the use of their homecare improvement solution.
According to NurseBuddy CEO Ville Tapani, “At the moment here’s an inefficiency in the homecare process, such as poor information sharing and control in the caring process. Which leads to higher costs, high employee turnover and more mistakes made by nurses.”
“With NurseBuddy, nurses know what they need to do with their patients and can easily report on their patient’s condition”
So how does the product work? Nurses carry a mobile device enabling them to record data such as when the patient has been visited, next scheduled visit, what they’ve done with the patient and what they need to do with the patient. That can be sent between managers and the patient’s relatives to keep them updated on what’s going on.
Managers and patients have their own interface from which they can monitor, communicate and follow up with the nurses.
When asked why healthcare providers need NurseBuddy, Tapani explained, “Only very small companies can share the information between the nurses and the managers in informal ways, but as soon as they grow bigger than 5 nurses, there will be problems in information flow. Even the very small companies must have some kind of system for reports and invoicing.”
The Turku startup is still in its early stages of development, but managed to get working prototype ready for field-testing in three months. NurseBuddy emphasizes an easy user experience for end-users and have been continuously seeking feedback from potential clients to improve their product.
Their main target group for now is home care service providers in Finland. However when asked where he sees NurseBuddy in five years time, Tapani’s response is,” We’re one of the leading solutions in home care improvement in the world.”
Obviously Tapani has big plans for NurseBuddy and also spoke of more developments to be announced later this year. But at this moment he’s keeping things under wraps.
Despite the healthcare industry being a tricky market to penetrate. We can only hope to see more startups enter this space. The industry is engulfed with opportunities that a lot of people have shied away due to the reasons mentioned in the beginning.
How many times do we complain about waiting in line for the doctor? Wouldn’t it be great if we could book our appointments online? Or better yet, what if you could consult a doctor online and save yourself a trip to the waiting room? Some of these services already exist, but there’s room for more innovation in the industry.
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About the author
Kostas Papageorgiou is a copywriter living in Turku, Finland. He specializes in creating engaging content for technology companies and has written content for Finnish, Dutch & US startups. Kostas also maintains a blog at Kanguro Communications where he talks about marketing and innovation. You can follow Kostas on Twitter @k_papageo
