While I was at Health 2.0 I got asked quite often why we started our application in Romania. I gave the obvious reasons such as that our programming team was located there (until it became too costly) or that Romania had just entered the EU so allowed us to take advantage of some favourable EU regulations that we wouldn’t have had in Switzerland.
But the fact is also that Romania is a place where companies go to innovate because you can try things out without too much risk of negative exposure if you make mistakes. This is important because start-ups usually spend the first year learning and muddling through so starting up in very high-visibility markets like the UK or Germany brings with it more risk. I’ve personally noticed many new types of businesses and concepts being field tested in Romania first before they are deployed to other parts of Europe.
In any case today the Romanian market received another eHealth start-up that is definitely worth noting - and that is Medic4All’s new telemedicine application called Medic4You. In partnership with Orange, this company provides a telemedicine application that also comes with a hand bracelet that measures blood pressure, pulse, ECG, body temperature, cardiac rhythm, level of oxygen saturation, and other medical parameters and transmits those via bluetooth to your phone which then transmits the data to your physician/personal health record.
I’m very impressed by the concept and very much look forward to testing this application out next time I’m in Bucharest.
