Viva Innovation (official site) is a Korean company that processes routine health screening data into insights for patients and medical professionals. The overarching context here is that the Korean government encourages and subsidizes bi-yearly routine health checks as a preventive measure to keep its citizens healthy. This offers the potential to detect and treat issues early when it is the easiest and least expensive.
A large portion of the Korean population takes this offer up, and therefore, large quantities of data are being generated but not always exploited to their full potential. That’s where the Kindoc platform comes into play.
The Kindoc (Android app) platform is divided into two aspects. There’s the Home Doctor Monitoring, an application patients use to track and understand their health status. The application has a knowledge base and an A. I (Artificial Intelligence) interface lets people enter symptoms to propose possible diagnoses. There’s also a pre-surgery checklist to ensure patients don’t forget something important during the surgery preparation phase.
The second aspect is the Healthcare Coach, which tracks and monitors healthcare metrics such as blood sugar levels, heart rate, blood pressure, body composition, etc. While not everyone is keen on following these on a regular basis, those who want to have an easy way to do it. Others can use historical data to look back over longer periods of time.
It is important to point out that the health data resides in a centralized government system, but the app itself can collect additional data to be recorded there, and more importantly, the app can add value by extracting insights and presenting different levels of information in a better way to doctors and patients.
Viva Innovation has many opportunities to distinguish itself from potential competitors who may have access to the same dataset (requires a government certification). Here’s where having a better user experience (UX) is paramount. If both patients and doctors have a common understanding of the data, their cooperation is easier and hopefully improves the health outcome.
The business model of Viva Innovation is based on partnerships with health institutions or hospitals that perform these routine health checks. The company essentially gets a share of the (subsidized) screening fee. Such institutions can get Viva Innovation CRM tools that cover appointment booking all the way to data processing and security.
Also, there are partnerships with big conglomerates who want to help their employees achieve higher health outcomes, notably with the help of the Kindoc platform via the Corporate Checkup program. Kindoc has all the patient-facing interfaces to enlist, remind, and manage employees in this context, making it easy to onboard new corporations. Some customizations are possible, but I didn’t venture into that rabbit hole.
At present time, Viva Innovation claims to be the #1 health checkup platform in Korea, even though there’s some competition. They have 1.3M active users per year, and their transaction volume has recently doubled.
Not every country has such a health program, but this technology could be adapted to other situations. At the moment, I think the low-hanging fruit would be to find places with something close, perhaps in Japan or other SE Asian countries.
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