Founded this year, the Warsaw-based healthcare startup Doctor.One has just raised a €440k pre-seed round from Movens VC.
Tomasz Rudolf and Maciej Malenda launched the company with the aim of restoring trust between doctors and patients as the foundation of healthcare, giving patients across Europe direct daily access to a doctor that knows them well.
Whilst the world has been experiencing a healthcare crisis with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, healthcare has become a central issue for many people, and it’s a profession that is experiencing a shortage of staff. Doctors and healthcare practitioners are increasingly overworked and underpaid and a sustainable work-life balance is proving harder and harder for them to achieve. The WHO predicts that the global shortage of health workers will reach 10 million by 2023, and so the healthcare issue and challenge of gaining access to trusted specialist care is only likely to increase.
Doctor.One has been created to address this burgeoning problem. Through joining forces with doctors, the founders have designed a new approach to improving access to personalized care without putting an extra burden on already overworked and undervalued health workers.
Doctor.One allows doctors to create and run a private medical practice in a subscription model. Unlike most telemedicine platforms, this virtual clinic is not centred around booking appointments. The cornerstone of the unique care model is daily “rounds”, allowing physicians to respond directly to messages from their well-known patients or check on the progress of treatment. Using the mobile-first platform, the doctors can provide help via asynchronous chat, start a video call without revealing a private number or issue a prescription. If necessary, they can invite the patient to an in-person visit or make a house call.
Tomasz Rudolf, CEO of Doctor.One, said: “We have designed a new continuous care model for the 21st century, built around a trusted doctor-patient relationship. The future of care cannot be limited to AI – automated and dehumanized. We need to balance technology innovations with human intimacy.”
As a result, the innovative startup is striving to put ‘care’ back to the forefront of healthcare, generating better outcomes and experiences for patients and healthcare workers alike.
The company has already launched its relationship-based healthcare model with a group of 40 doctors in Poland and plans to enter other EU countries in the near future. The social-impact startup hopes to onboard at least 10,000 doctors by 2025.
Maciej Malenda, co-founder and COO of Doctor.One, commented: “Thanks to our solution, doctors can offer their patients a completely new standard of care, without compromising work-life balance.”
