The past few months have seen a lot being written about the potential of telehealth and how a swathe of startups are betting on that to help fight the coronavirus. But what about all behind-the-scenes innovations that have sped up the processes of hospitals and thus play an equally crucial role, if not more?

On that note, let me introduce you to our latest startup for the week.

Meet Vicenna, a Lahore-based company that provides hospitals with tools to digitise their operations, from day-to-day processes like appointments to maintaining electronic records. Basically a 360-degree solution that cuts across functions, be it financial, administrative, clinical etc. And recently, they have added a telehealth module too, which allows medical institutes to enable online consultations, issue prescriptions and so on.

The startup was founded in December 2016 by Salman Akhtar and Kewan Khawaja — two alumni of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and working in tech for over 20 years.

“We were approached by an existing client from Peshawar, Rahman Medical College, to build a solution for their hospital side. But since this wasn’t our area of expertise, we advised them to go for some local or international company and tried helping find one. During that phase, we realised how expensive the US-based products were and how there is a significant opportunity and decided to work on Vicenna,” Akhtar recalls.

It makes money by charging a one-time implementation fee plus the annual subscription which in turn is based on tiered per-hospital admission pricing. As for the funds, they started out with putting one million dollars of their own but a few months back raised a round of $250,000 from mostly angels, as Akhtar says external funding is quite useful to validate the model.

Operating in the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) space, Vicenna is exposed to not only the local players but also the international ones which brings us to the question, how competitive is the industry? First, there are domestic tech companies offering customised solutions plus there is Shaukat Khanum’s portal, which is widely used. And then obviously, a whole universe beyond Pakistan, including giants like Epic, Cerner and many more unicorns in the US alone.

So what makes it well-positioned to grab a share of this market? “Locally, there are two types of players. First, take Shaukat Khanum which has a very aged product, that was tailor-made for them, and not for wider usage. Then there are small tech companies - for example Business Brain System in Karachi - catering to a different segment altogether, which I don’t think are our competition. If you move to the US-based solutions, they are very costly. For example, Epic’s implementation can be over even $300 million so it’s well out of reach for even the biggest hospitals in the country,” says Akhtar.

“On the other hand, our platform is not built for any particular institution and is suitable for all sizes - from a four-doctor clinic to a 600-bed hospital - without costing a fortune,” he adds.

That’s just the hospital management module of it, what about telehealth -- a phenomenon that has picked pace since the coronavirus outbreak leading to a number of startups in the industry coming up with this offering? Could the newer players operating usually on an Uberised model - and thus with a greater flexibility - pose any challenge in this regard?

“I think the business-to-consumer market is very different and though serving a very important role, it can’t provide the same kind of trust as a hospital does,” the founder says.

But forget competitors for now, and get to the more important question: how many hospitals in the country even go for such modern cloud-based platforms in the first place? And those who generally do, the bigger and private ones, might have the resources to build a customised solution that better serves them.

“First of all, Pakistan was just our testing ground and not the primary focus. Even then, there are over 1,500 private hospitals here. But that said, we want Vicenna to be a truly global product, and are particularly keen about expanding in the developing world where this can be a cheaper, mid-market solution compared to the Tier-1 options that usually have a price tag upwards of $10m,” the CEO says.

The writer is member of staff:

m.mutaherkhan@gmail.com

Twitter: @MutaherKhan

Published in Dawn, May 10th, 2020