HealthCode teams up influencers & innovators

‘Imagine Health’ is on a mission to improve the odds of success for health innovators. HealthCode.io, its flagship product, is the world's fastest growing community for key stakeholders in health. Members could meaningfully profile themselves, discover and chat with potential partners to further their collaboration objective. ‘Imagine Health’ was founded in July 2014 by Parag Agarwal and Sivaram Rajagopalan, while Fredrik Nyberg and Dr Prem Pillay joined the team as co-founders and investors in 2015 and 2016 respectively.

Selected excerpts from the Parag Agarwal’s interview with Baishali Mukherjee –

I have lived and worked in Singapore, India and Scotland and started my career in the tech transfer office of Strathclyde University - my alma mater. Before co-founding ‘Imagine Health,’ I spent a bulk of my 10-year medtech career promoting a breast cancer screening technology from Scotland in both the private sector and public health domains. The flippant barriers to adoption, in spite of all the clinical and technology validation led me to believe there has to be greater interconnection and awareness among key stakeholders about health. For innovation and ideas to make an impact, innovators and supporters alike had to collaborate faster and further.

I was lucky to have Sivaram with me as he has more than 23 years experience in healthcare, starting his career at Hewlett-Packard and subsequently Philips Medical. In the last eight years, he has transitioned from leading medtech MNCs in Singapore, India and Australia to advising and mentoring health startups and VC funds. He led efforts for India’s first formal resuscitation guidelines and is a tireless champion of connecting the dots for health startups.

A platform connecting stakeholders

HealthCode.io is a culmination of the team’s beliefs that such connections could be systematically made at scale. Our goal is to build the world's first end-to-end platform for collaboration in health - from discovery to execution. Our minimum viable product went live on the App/Play Store in December 2016.

The platform connects health innovators at any stage, location or subdomain with supporters who could help them succeed - clinicians, investors, engineers, scientists, public health officials, medical students and journalists. We are in talks with medical colleges to widen the appeal for students looking for a career beyond medicine. As the platform evolves with more features for contextual discovery and communication, we will look to partner with MNCs, NGOs and public health officials to host their challenges, competitions and specific collaboration needs.

The growth chart

‘Imagine Health’ is headquartered in Singapore, and we have operations offices in Mumbai and Wuhan, China. We work with a full time team of four in Mumbai and two Mumbai-based agencies for our product design/development. We also have a part-time medical student in China. Presently we are planning to grow the team for key leadership roles in Mumbai. Singapore, Israel and San Francisco will follow before the end of the year.

We have received good traction as of 30th April 2017. Since going live in December, 2016, members from 70 countries have signed up on HealthCode. Our 30-day retention rate is more than double the medical industry’s rate - averaging 38 per cent across the last four months. Several success stories have emerged of members connecting across borders. Our App and Play Store ratings average 4.9 stars (>25 reviews). In April 2017, we became the fastest growing community of its kind, with a 7x increase in daily installs and are on track to becoming the largest platform for key stakeholders in health by Dec 2017.

The roadmap

Our roadmap includes features that will widen the appeal of HealthCode.io among students and innovators at the idea stage, including those without teams. It will be faster and easier to discover members around common events, to organize to meet offline and also jointly bid for global health challenges and competitions. Once teams are formed, a global, curated marketplace of essential service providers will allow projects to be executed in a timely, cost-effective manner.

The revenue will come from businesses on the marketplace looking to build their brands or transact goods/services. Unique to HealthCode.io, businesses on the marketplace will also be recommended, rated and reviewed by the community - creating a sustainable and synergistic demand loop.

The next TED or Wikipedia

I am not worried about the level of innovation going down, regardless of the economic cycle or political headwinds - innovation is borne out of necessity, and current global health challenges will remain complex, persistent, and dispersed for a long time. We need greater visibility between innovators and supporters who could help them succeed.

I am inspired by Practo’s CEO Shashank’s philosophy of ‘build big or go broke’ - I see HealthCode.io staying as culturally relevant and impactful as TED or Wikipedia have been, more than 15 years since they began.

Have you ever been benefited by such community healthcare platform? Please share your views.

 

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