As Novac/Jutarnji/Bernard Ivezic writes, the Croatian startup Meddox has attracted more than 4,000 users in a mere two months. The first mobile application (app) for storing medical records and one of the first Croatian healthcare startups quietly released its product on the Google Play Store at the end of the summer this year.
Off to a fantastic start, this startup is still growing, although something similar already exists in Croatia. The health portal, as part of the state IT system CEZIH, brings together medical documentation from examinations and tests performed in hospitals and other state healthcare institutions in one place.
Vesna Babic, the co-founder of the Croatian startup Meddox, says that they decided on a different approach and, instead of the healthcare system, they put the patients themselves at the centre of the story.
”Even in CEZIH, part of the documentation isn’t available to all doctors that people visit, and documentation from private healthcare institutions can’t be included in that system at all. The meaning of Meddox is that each of us has our medical documentation in one place and always with us, easily accessible on our mobile phones,” says Babic.
She went on to explain that this important documentation is entered into the application in two ways. The first is by taking a photo, and the second is done by opening the document in the Meddox application, after which it processes it and makes it searchable.
”In this way, it becomes possible to store covid certificates, so many use our applications for that as well, and all the documentation is available at any time because it’s stored in the cloud,” Babic pointed out, adding that behind all this there is a broader meaning. According to a July McKinsey study, greater healthcare and more careful medication, or the more accurate monitoring of therapy, could reduce global health spending by up to 40 percent over a 20-year period. But this can only be done by people who are ”health literate”.
”With the Croatian startup Meddox, we want to enable people to take control of their health data and to improve their understanding of health information, and thus take better care of their own health,” noted Babic.
As an example of that, Meddox’s application offers a comparison of laboratory results of its users. As such, through easily understandable graphs, it shows an overview of the results in order to notice reduced or increased values in time. Babic, who has worked in the world of pharmacies for almost two decades, says the application recognises more than 1,000 laboratory parametres. She emphasised that the idea for the app was initially conceived by business partner Maja Bogovic, who is the founder and director of the job search portal Danasradim.hr (TodayIWork) and a former manager with extensive experience in managing procurement at both Ipercoop and Konzum.
”Healthcare differs from country to country, but the needs of the patient are the same everywhere,” Bogovic rightly noted.
Development took place during lockdown
She explained that she got the idea to develop the Croatian startup Meddox two years ago. After the Global Innovation Summit, at which the health and aging of the population was set as one of the most important segments of development in the next period, she began to think about which product everyone would need. It started to be realised last year when the lockdowns started due to the pandemic.
Vesna Babic explained that they developed the idea and then included experts, and even during in the summer, they had their first functional specification of the application and the framework design. Then they looked for investors.
”We presented the idea to family and friends and two of them invested in our startup. Then we founded companies and ordered the development of the application from the software company Blue Factory from Virovitica. In general, about a year passed from the idea to the placement of the application on the Google Play Store,” concluded Babic.
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