Reaching out to hospitals is no easy task

Are hospitals and medical professionals easy to reach? Are they keen on accepting digital health solutions? Is it easy to get customers? Van Anh shares experience during her summer internship and shows the path team Triumf is taking on that matter.

With dramatic transformation of healthcare, more and more doctors are adopting digital health solutions when diagnosing, treating and monitoring their patients. However, initially, they are hesitant to implement new technologies as few are properly developed and clinically tested. Therefore, introducing a new product is always a challenge, especially for a startup company. Here we share our experience in reaching out to healthcare professionals and spreading word about our solution.

We all know that the first impression is extremely important when one offers a new product or services to the world. What is even more important is that this first impression should be made for the right audience. There is no sense to make a perfect presentation for people who might be confused, unfamiliar or simply uninterested in anything we are doing. While our mobile platform is meant for children with wide range of chronic conditions, we are currently conducting clinical trials among children with cancer. Thus, at the moment we defined our primary audience as pediatricians, oncologists, psychologists and other medical personnel who are involved in helping children with cancer.

First of all, we reached out to hospitals in Estonia and Finland by contacting medical doctors and psychologists. In Finland we are lucky to be part of iCory consortium project which provides opportunities to connect with families and healthcare professionals, since they are interested in digital health solutions. For us, it is a great turning point for further development. In addition, we got the permission to start clinical trials in two hospitals in Estonia to evaluate the effectiveness of Triumf mHealth game for mental health and quality of life among children with cancer. The first trials are taking place in June-December this year.

In order to broaden our coverage, further we tried to reach the European paediatric hospitals. Our objective is to deliver our solution directly to European paediatric oncologists who deeply understand what is going on with our potential users. The main challenge is that there is no source where all oncologists would be listed. Therefore, we have to go through each of pediatric hospital, find their contacts and build our own list. It took long time, but was worth it, as approximately 20% have been interested in our solution.

Finally, we have been reaching to a wide audience of progressive healthcare professionals via Twitter (@TriumfHQ). We are trying to keep up with at least 4 news about digital health and mental health daily. Twitter has been a great channel in achieving our goals, as lots of those who are interested in mhealth solutions are visiting Twitter on daily basis, because all the news about tech progress appears there very fast. Up to now, we have 507 followers who are interested in our posts and check on our progress. Most of them are passionate about health technology. Many pediatric professionals, doctors and nurses follow us, and we hope they might help us build the bridge to the hospital.

We are always happy to tell anyone interested about our company, our vision and our mobile health solution for chronically ill children. If you are interested, please, contact us via Twitter (@TriumfHQ), Facebook (@triumf.health), or Email hero@triumf.health.