What is HealthHero?
HealthHero is a digital telehealth platform that provides remote access to doctors through a suite of virtual healthcare services, delivered 24/7 through phone, video calls and online chat. Our mission is to simplify healthcare and improve lives, by making it far easier for users to access the appropriate levels of care they need and drastically improve the efficiency of healthcare systems to alleviate the burden on healthcare professionals.
We are used by national health services to help connect them with their patients, but consumers can also use our services through our website or apps. We also work with a number of businesses and insurers to provide healthcare services to their staff or policyholders. Through these paths, we facilitate 3M consultations per year and in total we cover more than 30M individual lives.
What was the catalyst for launching HealthHero?
Almost all of us have had difficult experiences in the healthcare system. What makes it especially frustrating is that tech solutions have been around for a long time but few have made a material impact in improving the experience for patients or clinicians.
I came to the conclusion that there had to be a different approach – one that didn’t focus on marginal improvements by digitising isolated parts of the healthcare journey like patient records, but actually tackled the healthcare system as a whole. When we launched HealthHero, the idea was to deconstruct the healthcare journey and reconfigure it with technology at every touchpoint, to create a truly connected system for both patients and practitioners.
How has the business evolved since its launch?
We launched in 2019 and the past year has been a period of rapid growth for HealthHero, as we expanded both organically and through a number of strategic acquisitions. This has seen us very quickly become the largest digital telehealth solution in Europe by number of consultations and market presence.
We now employ 800 people across the group, under six separate brands (HealthHero, Validium, Qare, Fernarzt, Medvivo and Doctorlink), and have operations in the UK, Ireland, France and Germany.
What has been your biggest challenge so far?
One of the biggest challenges I have faced as a founder and CEO has been around hiring. When scaling at pace, it is very difficult to make sure you’re bringing in the right people, at the right time, into the right positions. I have learnt a lot about hiring the right person for the right role and having to be decisive in making the tough calls when it becomes clear that a relationship won’t work, even if there is goodwill on both sides.