“The world needs a more sustainable healthcare delivery model”, argues Ron Tenenbaum, CEO of Auckland digital health company, The Clinician.
The Clinician is on a journey to combat the rapid increase in healthcare expenditure, brought on by the world’s ageing population, the rise of chronic diseases and spiralling healthcare waste.
The solution: Its flagship product, ZEDOC, a value-based digital health platform that equips organisations to digitise care pathways and systematically capture the outcomes data needed to understand the ‘value’ of healthcare services delivered to patients.
The Clinician partners with healthcare organisations such as hospitals and private institutions to monitor and engage patients outside traditional care settings. This enables the seamless collection of health information from patients directly, as well as from wearables and connected medical devices.
The automated collection and analysis of healthcare data by ZEDOC provides clinical teams with comprehensive real-time dashboards for monitoring outcomes, assessing patient risk, and identifying clinical emergencies as they happen. These benefits all lead to enhanced patient outcomes, improved care delivery and contained costs for healthcare providers.
With over 85% of its customers overseas, it was a ‘no brainer’ for The Clinician to join the FernMark Licence Programme, says Tenenbaum.
“As soon as we heard about the country-of-origin programme, we saw it as an opportunity to differentiate ourselves on the world stage of digital healthcare providers.
“We wanted to be able to leverage all the beautiful things associated with being from Aotearoa New Zealand, including our kaitiaki, integrity and ingenuity.”
Not only does the FernMark provide a stamp of authenticity to The Clinician’s offering, but the trademark values of trust and credibility have been instrumental to its expansion and growth in new markets – with Australia and Singapore key focus areas for the business.
“When you present yourself as a digital health company from New Zealand, the first thing that countries look for is a guarantee around privacy and security – specifically – where their data is hosted and how it is being handled. Carrying the FernMark gives this validation, and these conversations are shortened from a few hours to usually just 30 minutes.
“The FernMark essentially helps to cement trust and reliability into our company profile. It’s clear that New Zealand is known for its stable democracy and low corruption rates, but beyond that, it’s also our reliability and hardworking reputation that gets us in the door.”
After six years in the market, The Clinician’s ZEDOC platform has advanced to become more flexible and end-to-end, resulting in patient engagement rates of more than 80%, a huge cut above the 30%-50% industry standard.
In the last six months, the business has seen a 300% increase in the number of live projects operating on its ZEDOC platform.
Tenenbaum puts this down to the business moving away from a ‘one size fits all’ approach, which has allowed The Clinician to elevate its offering to integrate and merge seamlessly with other IT systems.
The business’s unique response to a major hack of the Singapore public healthcare system in 2018 is just one example of this.
“After the Singapore public healthcare system was hacked, 1.5 million patient records were exposed, and the hospital systems could not access the outside world via the internet. We essentially ‘re-architectured’ the system’s infrastructure into a unique private-public hybrid model, making us the first commercial company to have a solution to satisfy the security review board.”
“I think our in-depth sector experience and ‘know how’ from the clinical world, combined with our flare for creative thinking, does give us a unique edge on the world stage”, says Tenenbaum
“This is another area where the FernMark contributes to our business, as it represents ingenuity and our ability to think outside-the-box.”
Looking forward, The Clinician is focused on disrupting the way healthcare organisations adopt digital technologies and on their horizon is a new ‘off-the-shelf’ offering, which providers and patients could set up from anywhere, at any time, as a pure SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) offering.
Tenenbaum is confident the FernMark will continue to be a significant enabler for the business to achieve international success as it diversifies its offering.
“Major tech companies such as Xero and Rocket Lab have fundamentally shifted the world’s perception of our country, so people today certainly have greater respect for the quality and potential of technology companies from New Zealand.”
“The FernMark represents the key principles that have enabled these companies to thrive. We’re confident that it underpins and reflects our own company values, which are driven by the vision of a better future for healthcare.”