Sydney founder Dr Katja Beitat has secured $350,000 in seed funding to develop a video and communications platform for health professionals to accelerate decision-making and improve patience care around the world.
Beitat says Clinivid was “born out of frustration” with one of healthcare’s biggest issues: “communication breakdowns”.
According to Beitat, these are a “huge contributing factor” to most problems that arise in the healthcare space.
“It all accumulates to delays [and] has a serious impact on patient care and quality,” Beitat tells StartupSmart.
Beitat, who began developing Clinivid about 18 months ago, has spent nearly a decade working for the New South Wales Health Care Complaints Commission.
“We dealt with everything that goes wrong with healthcare,” she says.
Clinivid enables clinicians to send video information about patients through an app that doesn’t disturb the recipient like a phone call would, says Beitat.
“An oncologist having to tell a patient they have terminal illness then gets interrupted by a phone call [to discuss another case is] something that happens every single day,” she says.
Clinivid is also designed for users to see when a message has been read, communicate instantly on patient cases, and assign tasks on urgent matters without compromising patient data confidentiality.
“This is a simple alternative that is safe and secure,” she says.
After meeting co-founder Minh Lee at Fishburners and receiving a government grant, Beitat says they developed a minimum viable product aimed at clinicians dealing with pathology and imaging results.
“Pathology and imaging underpins 90% of treatment,” she says.
Beitat and her team are now planning to develop Clinivid into an industry-wide solution where doctors, treaters and clinicians working across various organisations and facilities can continue to communicate on one platform.
“The big vision is that Clinivid is the one place for all clinical communication,” Beitat says.
“Because it’s a platform approach, communication is the starting point but there will be others services linked into the platform.”
According to Beitat, nearly 300 clinicians are already using the platform and this number is expected to rise as Clinivid rolls out more pilot programs.
“There is not much opportunity for cross-organisation communication and that’s the gap we want to close,” she says.
To help with this, Beitat has moved the startup into the Michael Crouch Innovation Centre to continue developing and improving Clinivid’s product offering with support of academic research and knowledge.
“A lot of untapped knowledge is sitting in our universities,” she says.
The decision to raise seed funding early
Beitat says the decision to raise seed funding early on was motivated by a desire to get a secure health product to market.
“We kept the seed round quite tight to prove traction first,” Beitat says.
The investment was led by Sydney-based venture capital firm Right Click Capital. An undisclosed clinician who is one of Clinivid’s early and “most active” adopters, also participated in the investment, says Beitat.
“[The health sector] is different to other industries where you can just put a product into the market and then improve it as you go,” she says.
“In health, the minimum standard for security and user point-of-view is [much] higher.”
In addition to the funding, Beitat says the investors bring with them a set of skills that will be integral to Clinivid’s ongoing future.
“It’s not only the money that counts, you also have to see whether they share your vision and roadmap,” she says.
“But [you also want to] see what complementary skills they bring.”
Before pitching for investment, Beitat says she completed the Elevacao program for women entrepreneurs in tech to help practice, refine and fine-tune her approach.
While she’s used to pitching to clinicians who immediately understand the value of Clinivid, Beitat says it was a new ball game talking to investors who had “completely different” preconceptions – if any – of the health industry.
“You really have to be clear [and succinct] on your vision,” she says.
“It’s not actually you just presenting, you have to listen and find where the alignment is [because] it’s not just a good presentation that will get you over the line, it’s a good match.”
Follow StartupSmart on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and iTunes.
