Here we interview co-founder Dr. Julio Bonis Sanz of Madrid, Spain-based Keyose.
In a PHR world of myriad, often bewildering functional options, they're elementally direct with their "just one color as long as its black" model:
The easiest and safest way to get your personal health data on real-time worldwide.
1. Tell us about the impetus to start, and you biggest learning to date?
ANSWER: Keyose started, as many interesting ideas from the problem. I am a family physician that works in a hospital emergency room and in a primary care center of Madrid, Spain. I had problems to access to the medical history of some patients so one day I though how to solve it. Having the basic information about the patients' diseases and treatments online came to my mind.
Keyose is not an IT company with a product-solution looking for a problem. Is about a real doctor with a real problem looking for a convenient solution.As a Family Physician I really believe in patient-centered medicine. So the highest aim of Keyose is patient empowerment.
My biggest learning to date is the importance of being focused in the patient needs and team working. I am learning a lot from some technological and management partners. We have built a really interesting multidisciplinary team.
2. How are your current audience metrics, and what are you doing to drive traffic, and how do you monetize the site?
ANSWER: I am not really concerned by the moment about big audience. We are focused in understanding the real needs of our users. By the moment we have up to 800 users worldwide (from China to South Africa, from Chile to USA). Maybe not so much in 'IT terms', but high quality ones. We get a lot of useful feedback from them.
We don't want to invest money in advertising Keyose, so we can focus our efforts in understanding our users needs. And the prevalent concern of our users from the beginning is privacy.
Of course, I understand that any service has costs and we need to have a business model to cover those costs. I am not dreaming about becoming rich with this project. Just to give a useful service to my patients. So we are planning to offer extra clinical services to our users for a fee.
As a "clinical flavored project" we have given up the idea of "contextual adwords" (direct or indirect) or similar. I consider that personal medical information should be used just for clinical reasons, or maybe for research.
As a "clinical flavored project" we aim to be a universal service, so our prizes will be probably adjusted to the income of our users. Nobody will be outside Keyose because of lack of money. We are, for instance, exploring innovative business models so people from developing countries can benefit from full Keyose services.
3. What 2-3 firms are your key competitors, and how are you different?
ANSWER: Main competitors are Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault. We love competitors as they stimulate us to improve our service. We have two fundamental differences with them:
- Firstly, we are a "clinical project", going from the problem to the solution. This "clinical nature" impregnates all our decisions and business model. Google and Microsoft are IT companies with a solution in search for a problem. This makes a big difference between Keyose and the others.
- Secondly, and as result of the previous, we are a totally anonymous personal health record. This is a unique characteristic of Keyose, and we are the first PHR designed in that way. Anonymity provides the higher privacy in our opinion. In Keyose we like to say: "Confessors will not ask your name. Why do we?"
4. Regarding audience, are you Direct-to-Consumer, working through partners on a private-label or other basis, or both?
ANSWER: As a family physician I believe in direct-to-patient relationships. We are a "clinical flavored project" so we are trying to keep that approach. Of course cooperation with other stakeholders as health-care providers, EHR companies, public health organisms, medical devices companies and other PHRs is important for us, as far it can be useful for our users and anonimity of Keyose is assured. Anonymity and data integration are not good friends, but this is the interesting challenge of Keyose, and we are finding some innovative approaches to solve the problem.
By the moment we are focusing in building a strong and useful direct relationship with the users, while keeping an eye on potential partners.
5. What do you have coming soon that we should know about?
ANSWER: In the next days, and after some users asked as for, we will add functionality that allows users to upload medical images to the Keyose PHR and to track some prevalent chronic medical conditions (as hypertension, diabetes or obesity). Our philosophy is to implement only the tools that our users ask for. Of course we are always open to new ideas.
We cover the key Online Health/PHR/EMR companies in our wiki; the entire list is here. Should we be covering your company? Email us at mattc [@] marketintellnow.com.
MarketIntellNow® eStore
NOTE: We're marketintellnow on all the IM services, including Skype and Twitter.
