TECH TALK: A 360-degree enterprise solution for hospitals.

Byline: Mutaher Khan

The past few months have seen a lot being written about the potential of telehealth and how a swathe of startups are betting on that to help fight the coronavirus. But what about all behind-the-scenes innovations that have sped up the processes of hospitals and thus play an equally crucial role, if not more?

On that note, let me introduce you to our latest startup for the week.

Meet Vicenna, a Lahore-based company that provides hospitals with tools to digitise their operations, from day-to-day processes like appointments to maintaining electronic records. Basically a 360-degree solution that cuts across functions, be it financial, administrative, clinical etc. And recently, they have added a telehealth module too, which allows medical institutes to enable online consultations, issue prescriptions and so on.

The startup was founded in December 2016 by Salman Akhtar and Kewan Khawaja - two alumni of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and working in tech for over 20 years.

'We were approached by an existing client from Peshawar, Rahman Medical College, to build a solution for their hospital side. But since this wasn't our area of expertise, we advised them to go for some local or international company and tried helping find one. During that phase, we realised how expensive the US-based products were and how there is a significant opportunity and decided to work on Vicenna,' Akhtar recalls.

It makes money by charging a one-time implementation fee plus the annual subscription which in turn is based on tiered per-hospital admission pricing. As for the funds, they started out with putting one million dollars of their own but a few months back raised a round of $250,000 from mostly angels, as Akhtar says external funding is quite useful to validate the model.

Operating in the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) space, Vicenna is exposed to not only the local players but also the international ones which brings us to the question, how competitive is the industry? First, there are domestic tech companies offering customised solutions plus there is Shaukat Khanum's portal, which is widely used. And then obviously, a whole universe beyond Pakistan, including giants like Epic, Cerner and many more unicorns in the US alone.

So what makes it well-positioned to grab a share of this market? 'Locally, there are two types of...