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13 CEE startups that rock the healthcare sector
sebastianh Posted On April 3, 2014


The healthcare industry has been a multi-billion business ever since. In recent years, more and more startups have been exploring the sector and are advancing in it with innovation, passion and expertise. Here is our selection of some of the teams to keep an eye on. Do you have more startups on your radar? Let us know!

Austria

Diagnosia       

The Viennese startup founded in 2011 is providing healthcare solutions as a web and mobile application and has a comprehensive databank with all of the licensed medications in Austria and is internationally connected. The system is designed especially for doctors, who can use it to check medications and possible side effects with prescriptions a patient already has. More on the team can be found here.

mySugr

The Vienna-based startup tries to turn the cumbersome supervision of diabetics’ blood sugar into an easier routine. By now, mySugr has entered the American market and has over 100,000 users. They have also developed a specialised version for children that should make keeping an eye on their blood sugar fun and less annoying. Read more about the venture and their founder here and here.

Symptoma

With the Austrian startup Symptoma, patients and doctors alike can type in a symptom, add additional parameters such as sex and age, and can so find the possible causes for a certain symptom. Among the information they get is statistics such as the incidence of a disease, distribution of the disease among the genders, distribution of age and geographic indicators. Read our profile on founder Jama Nateqi here.  

Bucinator

Bucinator, supported by Innsbruck-based incubator CAST Tyrol, is an alarm system for nurses and other caretakers in hospitals and retirement and caretaking facilities. It’s a fall prevention system attached to matrasses that sends off an alarm signals to the nurse’s station if a patient e.g. sits up or is in danger of falling off the bed. Bucinator has won the Newcomer Innovation Award for Geriatric Care 2014.

Vira Therapeutics

Also a CAST Tyrol-supported venture, Vira Therapeutics raises the bar: The startup that has its roots at the Medical University Innsbruck seeks to fight cancer the innovative way. They are developing a highly potent oncolytic virus that can be used for cancer treatment. It has so far helped the biotech startup win first prize at the Best of Biotech business plan competition in 2012. Read more about them here.

Bulgaria

Smart Hand

The Bulgarian team of Smart Hand has an ambitious goal: to produce the perfectly usable hand – artificially. To help amputees, the team wants to engineer the ultimate robotic hand, minimise the risk of phantom pain and – literally – give amputees their limb back. Read more about them here.

Slovakia

Diagnose.me

The Slovak startup specialises in giving patients the possibility to get a second opinion on their radiologic diagnosis. Via their website, patients who want to have their X-ray, MRI or CT scans looked at by radiologists other than their treating physician can send in their images and get a second or third opinion. For that purpose, Diagnose.me has partnered up with radiologists from around the globe and employs medical interpreters to translate medical reports so people can be helped in confirming, editing or correcting their initial diagnosis.

ASANA

The Slovaks from Asana have created a special chair inspired by the ancient tradition of Yoga (Asana is also an expression from Yoga, frankly just meaning “sitting down”) that allows people to solely sit on their hips and part of the buttocks. Thus they create a very comfortable seating position, with one of their main goals being to prevent hemorrhoids.

Slovenia

Mediately

The Slovenian startup Mediately has programmed an app that contains basically all relevant drugs and medications available. With it, doctors but also patients can cross match prescriptions and check if the drug the doctor is going to prescribe could interfere with another one the patient already takes. Read their Startup Pick here.

Serbia

TeleSkin

The Serbian enterprise, founded already in 2007, wants to fight skin cancer and other dermatologic diseases with high tech. TeleSkin develops and produces hard- and software for tracking moles and provides the infrastructure to share the newest findings on one’s skin with a doctor. In 2013, they won Microsoft’s healthcare innovation award and now have partner clinics throughout Serbia.

Estonia

Cognuse

Cognuse is management and aid software for healthcare administrators in hospitals, as well as experts and patients undergoing rehabilitation. The CognuseManager programme collects data about the progress of a patient and provides medical professionals with viable information about how rehabilitation exercises are working on their patients. Originally from Estonia, the team of four has in the meantime made it to California and has international distributors in Japan, Hong Kong, China and the US.

Croatia

Greenpie

The startup from Croatia has developed an online service available for computers, tablets and smartphone that allows nutrition experts or dietitians to optimise nutrition counseling processes virtually. Dietitians, nutritionists or doctors can track the progress of their patients online, give them advice or set new goals for them by editing their nutritional schedule. 

IDerma

The Zagreb-based startup created an app that lets doctors easily keep track of their patients. Appointments can be scheduled, postponed or rearranged as well as prescription plans updated or edited. Doctors can directly communicate with their patients, give them advise on their treatment or use a database connected with the app for research. The duo Ana Burica and Josipa Majic are also on the forefront of Teddy the Guardian, a plush teddy bear toy that monitors a child’s vital signs. Catch up on them here. 


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“The medical sector is hardcore”
alena Posted On May 13, 2013


As we’ve shown in the first two articles of our thematic focus on startups from the medical and healthcare sectors, the business field is one of the most promising around (see our previous articles on the prospects for digital health and medical and healthcare startups in the EU). While good money can be made once a viable business idea for the medical or healthcare sector has been implemented, the path there is rather rocky. Much more than other fields, the healthcare industry is characterised by a lot of legal requirements, which is a good thing – considering that it deals with actual human lives. For this reason, there is a higher claim for market maturity of products than in other areas, as Dr. Jama Nateqi, founder of medical search engine Symptoma, highlights.

An important dividing line

“There is an important dividing line between simply improving health – through fitness products and the like – and targeting patients with actual diseases with your startup,” Fredrik Debong, co-founder of diabetes management company mySugr told inventures.eu.

Debong advises entrepreneurs, who want to start their business in the medical sector to ask themselves two important questions: “First, you should ask yourself ‘Does my product have an impact on a person’s health, or on a patient’s therapy?’ If you answer the second question with ‘yes’, you’re working on a medical device. Secondly, you should ask, ‘Could my product represent a risk to patients?’ – to clear this up, you need to get in touch with the respective national authorities and institutions like the European Medicines Agency (EMA), ISO, TÜV, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the US – or you can also contact us for advice.”

Medical devices: a highly regulated industry

Offering a medical device with your startup, in the words of Debong is “hardcore”:  “It involves a long process of getting certifications and licensing on behalf of authorities. It’s not only very cost intensive, it’s also extremely difficult. It’s a very process-oriented endeavour.”

It took mySugr one and a half years to design the process and another one to implement their product, before their app could launch on the Austrian and the EU-market in 2012. mySugr is certified by the ISO 13485, an international standard for medical devices, and approved by TÜV Austria.

Sava Marinković, founder of Serbian startup TeleSkin had similar experiences. TeleSkin develops hardware, software, and mobile solutions for the early diagnosis of skin cancer, melanoma, and other dermatological conditions. Founded in 2007, the startup received Microsoft’s HealthCare Innovation award at HIMMS 2013 in New Orleans this year and are preparing to launch their SkinScan mobile and tablet software next month. One of the biggest challenges to Marinković was figuring out the legal situation. “For device startups, the regulations can be costly and time-consuming,” he points out.  

This dependency on regulations is also the reason Nateqi of Symptoma does not believe that the sector is generally immune to recession – despite its promising market growth potential. “Particularly in the healthcare industry, business models can practically change over night through changes in national regulations – an example of this is the pharmaceutical industry in Germany.”

Health through fitness

Runtastic is the most successful Austrian startup that deals with health from a fitness perspective. Its co-founder and CEO Florian Gschwandtner considers Runtastic a Mobile Health & Fitness Company and not a mHealth provider in the strict sense, he told inventures.eu. “In my opinion, many areas are overlapping. But Runtastic clearly puts the fitness approach into the foreground, with health as the resulting component. With new apps, like our Heartrate App, we show that essential health parameters will also form part of our ecosystem in the future.”

Gschwandtner gives the thumbs up to fellow Austrian startups mySugr and Diagnosia and believes that, “many business models are yet to be developed in this area. After all, when we started out in 2009, nobody believed that mobile business could become a business model, where you could actually make money. This is why we didn’t find any investment back then and most people advised us not to found Runtastic.”

Going international

According to Nateqi, business models aiming to lower the costs of healthcare work best in the US, “where the disproportion between costs and performance of the healthcare system is highest.“ Getting a permission to launch your medical product on the US market through the FDA, however, poses even further challenges for European startups aiming to take their business abroad.

But there is reason to be optimistic for mHealth startups aspiring to conquer this lucrative market: “The FDA will publish their guidelines for the mHealth sector, soon – this is a change that startups from the field have been anticipating for years,“ Debong knows. “Once the guidelines are out, it will finally become clear how European mobile health startups can deal on the US market.”

For Austrian startup Abotic, winning an American licensing partner – Drive Medical, the second biggest global player for medical appliances – meant entry to the global market (see our previous report). The mechatronics company founded by Nick Manseder and Albrecht Karlusch in 2008 has developed an innovative, cheap and easy to install automatic door opener targeted at wheelchair users.

Medical startups: more than just apps

Abotic’s success proves that not just the development of digital, but also tangible products can turn into a scalable business model in the healthcare industry. In late 2012, the startup secured a one million euro investment for further research and development, as inventures.eu reported.

Fellow Austrian Bucinator and Slovakian Asanasi are further interesting examples of CEE startups that are creating medical hardware – although hard is probably not the right expression to describe their products.

Founded by Dr. Johannes Hilbe in 2011, Bucinator have developed a sensor mattress, which senses that you will get up before you actually got up. Bucinator’s innovations in the field of sensors are particularly targeted at elderly people in nursing homes and hospitals – a growing demographic. Bucinator provides sensors to prevent falls and increase the safety level of their target group without restraining them, thus improving their life quality, while requiring less resources for observation duties. After the product has been tested and launched, the startup is now ready to scale.

Asanasi have created a chair inspired by a natural yoga sitting position (Asana) that promises to exert no pressure on the tailbone and rectum by enabling the user to sit on his or her thighs and buttocks – thus alleviating pains commonly associated with haemorrhoids. While the Slovakian startup answers to a slightly taboo problem, the chair itself does not evoke that association. “The revolutionary chair
that amazes doctors“ looks more like a designer piece than a medical device, which is probably why the winners of last year’ StartupAwards.sk have sold more than 1100 of its chairs starting from 422 euros a piece since their launch in 2010.

What’s in it for CEE startups?

Although the American market seems promising and Europe still appears to lag behind as far as far as developments and also the right attitude for innovation are concerned (see our previous article), making it as a CEE startup in the medical and health sector is not necessarily dependent on the location.

Sava Marinković of Teleskin believes that the challenges faced by CEE startups in the medical field are “the same as anywhere else in the world”: You have to have the right talent, medically, technically and as far as your strategy is concerned, “to build a product that solves the right problems.” Then you have to determine the right business model because, “solving a problem doesn’t necessarily guarantee profitability and many problems exist because the current approaches and attempts to solve them are unsustainable,” he told inventures.eu.  

While not operating in the medical industry himself, Runtastic’s Florian Gschwandtner encourages aspiring founders of health-focused startups: The legal regulations that are different for every country may pose big challenges, but “for exactly these reasons, big things are possible in the sector, because not everyone dares to enter this area, which is why there is a lot of room for new ideas and innovation.”

And one final word of advice from the founders of Croatian startup IDerma, Josipa Majić and Ana Burica: “What is probably most important, entering an industry as closed as this particular one is hardly possible without a solid background and support from the inside. (…) And have in mind that medical staff is very specific when it comes to sales and negotiation.” Thus, before starting out with your groundbreaking medical and healthcare innovation, get the support and advice of established medical professionals and institutions – and know how they operate.

Read more on the subject: 

Med and Health Startup Focus Part 1: An app a day keeps the doctor away?
Med and Health Startup Focus Part 2: The future of healthcare startups in the EU
Profile Fredrik Debong (co-founder mySugr): Vienna’s Sugar Daddy
Profile Jama Nateqi (founder Symptoma): Just what the doctor ordered
mySugr Junior: Answering to an alarming trend
Abotic: The Opposite of an Exit – How to get a Licensing Deal
Abotic secures 1million euro investment from Bon Venture

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The future of healthcare startups in the EU
marijas Posted On May 7, 2013


In our second instalment on CEE startups in the medical and health sectors, we look at the prospects in the EU (read part 1 here)

In a recent guest post on US health startup incubator Rock Health’s website, Frank Boermeester of HealthStartup.eu provided a neat dissection of the current state of the European digital health scene, which might go a long way in debunking the idea that digital health is primarily an American story. Although the old continent still lags behind the US, the long-term growth trends of a “robust and expanding digital health ecosystem” in Europe are clear, including a highly developed pharmaceuticals industry and top academic institutions.

The socio-demographic backdrop is also heavily weighing in favour of innovation and reform within the sector, given the financial unsustainability of the EU healthcare system and the challenges brought on by an increasingly ageing population. To bring costs down, “technology is needed, and fast”, says Boermeester.

Especially promising advances are being made in sensors, mobile and data management. As recognised by the Austrian company 4a medicom, the most dynamic trends in strengthening healthcare in the EU revolve around disease prevention, decentralisation of diagnosis and intervention, and containment of cost.

While the market heterogeneity across the 27 EU member states does call for greater customisation in a variety of areas and makes efficient scaling difficult, the EU economy is still the biggest in the world in terms of GDP, and the regulatory environment may be less constraining than commonly believed. “Once a company has obtained its CE mark (which certifies that the product is safe, but not necessarily effective) it can, in principle, begin commercialising its product anywhere in the EU while simultaneously gathering data and conducting the necessary clinical efficacy trials,” writes Boermeester.

Bringing “Better, Faster, Cheaper” to Europe 

When it comes to disrupting healthcare, the ultimate goal can be defined as “having systems in place, which will eventually be able to mine all the available health data to create customised recommendations for each patient”, says Dr. Kapil Parakh. Dr. Parakh is Director of Heart Failure at John Hopkins Bayview Medical Center and US expert on the intersection of health, behaviour and technology (see Dr. Parakh’s TNW interview, Bringing the Lean Startup Approach to Healthcare).

US seed-accelerator Rock Health was the first of its kind to specialise on digital health and healthcare technology startups. It divides participating startups in a range of health service-oriented categories, ranging from “Quantify yourself” to “Enhancing the provider-patient relationship”, via “Sensing Stuff”. For an in-depth view of what’s already out there on a global scale, see their Startup List.

Europe has been catching up on the trend with accelerators, such as healthbox (London), Modern Aging (Stockholm), HealthXL (Startup Bootcamp) (Dublin) and Health Axis Europe (in Cambridge, UK; Leuven, Belgium and Heidelberg, Germany). Ireland has become a bit of a digital health hot spot with the eHealth Week conference to be hosted in Dublin next week, from 13-15 May. Co-organised by the European Commission, the Irish Presidency of the EU Council, and HIMSS Europe the three-day event brings together the full spectrum of relevant EU industry and policy-making stakeholders, expecting to attract about 2.500 attendees. The thematic focus this year will be on “delivering innovation and well-being, focusing on mHealth, cross border co-operation and empowering patients and staff through the use of ePortals”.

In her recent blog post “Calling all small businesses with bright ideas for e-Health!” the Vice-President of the European Commission, Neelie Kroes, acknowledges the central role played by small and medium-sized companies in the digital healthcare sector and the opportunities offered through Europe-wide competitions and events such as the eHealth Solution EU SME Competition organized by TICBioMed with the endorsement of the Health and Wellbeing Unit of DG CONNECT of the European Commission. (Winners of this year’s Competition will be announced at the abovementioned eHealth Week conference in Dublin).

While many health startups descend from North Western Europe and also the Baltic countries (among them Latvian Blue Bridge Technologies and Estonian Cognuse Neuroscience), CEE seems to be lagging behind these recent developments on the medical and healthcare sectors – there are no nominees from the region in the eHealth Solution EU SME Competition this year or the year before.

Scaling medicine and accelerating data in Europe – Overcoming cultural barriers?

The relative underrepresentation of European startups in the field may also have to do with cultural factors. In another blog post entitled “A Digital Health Manifesto: the future of healthcare, possible today”, Frank Boermeester advises startups “to think beyond single-purpose products and explore how they can plug into the existing healthcare plumbing and link up with other synergistic developers.” The overall aim? Cutting costs in a way that simultaneously improves both quality and effectiveness of care. Despite this being 2013, there may still be cultural and moral barriers to overcome: “the promise of digital health technologies lies in a more transparent and efficient health market”, says Boermeester, where “consumers and patients play a more responsible and engaged role.” He ventures that, in ideological terms, this is a “tall order” for Europe.

This seems to be particularly the case for the CEE region. Co-founders Josipa Majić and Ana Burica of Croatian startup IDerma told inventures.eu, “we have noticed that medical startups are not as present as we would probably want due to numerous reasons. But the trends are changing as we speak and hopefully we will have the opportunity to see more of them dealing with healthcare improvementsas well as cooperate with greater number of Croatian investors, mentors and potential advisors who have experience in medical industry.” 

According to Dr. Jama Nateqi, founder of medical search engine Symptoma, the European authorities, both on a national and on an EU level, should work on improving the healthcare system structurally, “so that the performance principle can be implemented efficiently. In that way, startups with the best solutions can find a faster entry into the system.”

Not only web and mobile startups are creating promising solutions for the medical and health sectors. Stay tuned for part three of our med and health focus, to learn how CEE startups are revolutionising the healthcare market with innovative tangible products. 

Read more on the subject: 

Med and Health Startup Focus Part 1: An app a day keeps the doctor away?
Profile Fredrik Debong (co-founder mySugr): Vienna’s Sugar Daddy
Profile Jama Nateqi (founder Symptoma): Just what the doctor ordered  

mySugr Junior: Answering to an alarming trend

To learn more about growth prospects for digital healthcare in the EU, see the European Commission’s eHealth Action Plan 2012-2020


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An app a day keeps the doctor away?
alena Posted On May 6, 2013


The first instalment of our focus on CEE startups in the medical and health sectors deals with the prospects for Digital Health

For centuries, people have been coming up with ways to cure their pains and ailments –and for many of them, it has proven to be a lucrative business field. With aging societies and people increasingly willing to invest in their personal well-being, the sector is expected to experience even higher growth in the near future. Unsurprisingly, an increasing number of startups, particularly in web and mobile, are aiming to provide digital medical solutions and tap into this market.

A recent study by PriceWaterHouseCoopers on “Connected Life” expressed high hopes in regard to mobile health (mHealth) solutions: By 2017, it could help save 400 billion US dollars in the healthcare systems of developed countries, while in Sub-Saharan Africa, over a million lives could be saved through mobile interventions. 

On the financial side, the global market for mHealth is expected to reach 10,2 billion US dollars by 2018 from 1,3 billion in 2012 at an annual growth rate of 41.5%, according to a report by Transparency Market Research. The largest share of this market revenue is currently generated in North America followed by Europe and the Asia Pacific region, with India emerging as one of the mHealth hotspots. Differentiating between monitoring services, diagnostic services, healthcare system strengthening and other services, the study assigns the highest potential to monitoring solutions. In 2012, they had contributed about 63% of the global mHealth market revenue.

Monitoring health conditions

mySugr offer such a mobile monitoring service for diabetes mellitus patients (see our previous reports). The Austrian startup co-founded by Fredrik Debong has developed an app, which helps with the tedious checking of blood sugar levels.

After one year on the market, about 10.000 diabetes patients mainly in Austria, Germany and Italy are now using the mySugr app to monitor their therapy. Debong, who is a diabetes patient himself, is aware of the market potential of their product and hopes to grow their customer base to 60.000 users by the end of the year.

More than just helping to cut administrative costs, Debong is convinced that mHealth can also improve the quality of healthcare: “Mobile health solutions can help to engage patients and motivate them to do something about their condition, for instance by employing the principles of gamification, and to stick to their therapy – half of the medication prescribed by doctors gets thrown away. Moreover, it can facilitate communication and the exchange of information between doctors and patients. In hospitals, a lot of time is invested in administration and not the patients directly.” 

Upcoming Croatian startup IDerma has, similarly, set out to solve problems in the communication between dermatologists and patients suffering from skin conditions. With a cloud-based tool, founders Josipa Majić (CEO and Sales) and Ana Burica (Product Manager), aim to enable patients to track and monitor their health condition and thus get directly involved in the treatment of skin conditions, the majority of which are of psychosomatic nature. 

The startup is bootstrapped and has been working on their product for less than a year. Now, IDerma have reached a point, where negotiating potential investments and strategic partnerships makes sense for them, the founders told inventures.eu. According to Majić and Burica, a couple of regional private clinics are already preparing to implement IDerma. In addition to doctors and clinic owners, they say that insurance companies in the US have shown interest in their solution, opening a new perspective for IDerma on the international market.

Helping doctors with their work

As for global market shares, diagnostic services aiming to assist medical doctors with their work make up the second most important business field in the Digital Health sector. Two Austria-based pioneers of such offers are Symptoma and Diagnosia, which were both founded by medical doctors.

German-born Dr. Jama Nateqi developed Symptoma – a “Google for physicians” – to answer to a shortcoming he encountered during his medical studies in Salzburg. The information available to him when researching symptoms online was not satisfactory to the ambitious student. Out of this discontent arose the idea of fusing his IT and medical skills to build up an online database of diseases. “97% of physicians are not satisfied with the current professional and medical research options. Unfortunately, they don’t have the proper tools and resources to check differential diagnoses efficiently,” Nateqi told inventures.eu.  

This seems to be the background of an alarming statistic: “15% of all diagnosis of life threatening diseases is actually misdiagnosis. This means that per year, there are around half a million of patients worldwide who could have been saved, had they been correctly diagnosed.”

Nateqi sees the greatest market potential for Symptoma in the US, where the disproportion between costs and performance of the healthcare system is highest. Americans spend more than double the amount of money on healthcare (8.000 dollars per person per year) as citizens of comparable industrialised countries (the OECD average is 3.200 dollars). Yet, their life expectancy (78,2 years) is lower than the EU average of 79,76 years.

In a similar vein, Dr. Fritz Höllerer, Dr. Lukas Zinnagl, and Marco Vitula started Diagnosia as a cloud-based service to provide reliable information on pharmaceuticals to medical professionals. The Vienna-based startup was awarded “best European eHealth Startup“ at the 2011 Doctors 2.0 conference in Paris. Based on medical decisions and expert information on pharmaceuticals, the team are developing the Diagnosia Index, which is a novel approach to providing pharmaceutical information.

 

More Digital Health startups from CEE:  

MIRArehab from Romania develops video-games to provide a more effective way for physiotherapists to treat their patients.

aeskulapp is an Austrian mHealth app developer also offering associated marketing and consultancy services. The team organised the 1st Austrian mHealth Day in 2012.

CaverSoft s.r.o. from the Czech Republic has created CAVER, a software tool for protein analysis and visualisation.

mcule is a Hungarian startup founded in 2011 offering an integrated drug discovery platform. They are the winners of the 2nd prize at the Hungarian InnovationTechshow 2012 and were featured at Startup Sauna Fall 2012.

MedCrunch is an online magazine covering health, medicine, entrepreneurship and technology. It was established by Austrians Franz Wiesbauer and Lukas Zinnagl of Diagnosia.

Stay tuned for part two of our med and health focus, to learn more about developments on the sector in the EU. 

Read more on the subject: 

Profile Fredrik Debong (co-founder mySugr): Vienna’s Sugar Daddy

Profile Jama Nateqi (founder Symptoma): Just what the doctor ordered 

mySugr Junior: Answering to an alarming trend


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