Long-time clubman Lachie Wheeler featured in the Financial Review last week following the success of his 2012 start-up business, HealthKit.
Lachie has played 278 games for the Rovers since 1999, is a Life Member, has served on the committee, and is back for another season in 2016 having played in the practice game last Saturday. Good to see him kicking goals off the field also with HealthKit pushing to expand overseas. Below is the article from the AFR on Friday 29th February. You can also visit the company website at www.healthkit.com
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HealthKit raises $1.6 million for expansion plans
HealthKit raised $1.6 million from investors to expand overseas and fulfil its goal of becoming the most popular software system for doctors and medical practices in Australia.
Founded by former ANZ Bank employees Alison Hardacre and Lachlan Wheeler in 2012, HealthKit provides software on the cloud that integrates patient records, invoices, diary bookings, financial reports and Medicare claims for practitioners and allows patients to easily search for doctors and specialists.
Ms Hardacre said the business was closing in on its biggest competitor, Medical Director (owned by ASX-listed company Primary Health Care), and the money would help it become larger.
“We’re almost the size of the largest incumbent in Australia, and we’ve done that with only seed funding,” she said. “Healthcare is ripe for disruption. For too long things have been the way they are and there’s been no innovation.”
The lead investor in the latest funding was a family who did not want to be identified.
Internationally, HealthKit will focus on the United Kingdom, Europe and Asia. Both business founders speak a number of Asian languages and Indonesia will be its first non-English-speaking market. Mr Wheeler has lived there and says he understands the culture.
The company was thrust into the public eye in 2014 after a trademark dispute with Apple, which launched a service using the name HealthKit.
It has 10,000 general practitioners and specialists using the software in Australia (Medical Director has 16,000 according to its website) across 6000 medical practices, and 1000 others spread over 40 countries.
Ms Hardacre said the system made administrative tasks quicker and easier for practitioners, enabling them to see more patients in a day.
” As a patient, you can find a practitioner and search based on profession, location and areas of interest. Then you can track your health between appointments – regardless of whether it’s with a practitioner using HealthKit or not – you can create your own case notes between appointments, and practitioners can assign you assessments to complete between appointments,” she said.
HealthKit is free to use but there are charges for add-on services.
More innovation is expected after the government’s e-health bill passed last year, creating a digital health record for everyone unless they opt out.
Deloitte has estimated that the mobile device health industry will be worth $21 billion by 2018 and PwC’s 2014 Health Research Institute Report found that digitally enabled care had moved from a “nice-to-have” to a “fundamental of delivering high-quality care”.
In 2015 a local start-up called CliniCloud launched, which sells internet-connected stethoscopes that can be remotely listened to by clinicians with a digital thermometer.
Melbourne-based business Global Kinetics has also created a watch for Parkinson’s patients which measures their movements, which helps doctors provide them with the correct treatment.
Ms Hardacre said medical institutions were also starting to focus more on data.
“We’ve built HealthKit with data in mind from inception,” she said.
“We can see disease clusters, where there are shortages of practitioners based on those clusters, and we hope our data can improve health systems and enable researchers to see trends around health.”
Read article on AFR: http://www.afr.com/technology/healthkit-raises-16-million-for-expansion-plans-20160227-gn5hym#ixzz42DfYVJtP
