A New Backend for Front-Line Doctors: Our Investment in Doctorly

We’re thrilled to announce that Speedinvest is leading the $5.6M seed round of Berlin-based digital health tech company Doctorly, which is building a practice management suite that helps doctors waste less time on administration and enables people to live healthier lives.

[TLDR for Techies: Doctorly is hiring in Berlin, apply here to join the team]

As patients, we know how frustrating it can be to visit your doctor. After scoping out a practice, making the midday slot on the other side of town work, filling out repetitive forms, sitting in a waiting room with the daily catch of infectious diseases, and explaining your medical history to an overworked doctor who only has five minutes for you… her screen freezes.

It’s hard to think of equally agonizing user experiences in other industries. This is also a result of the economics of public practices in Germany. On average, German general practitioners employ five staff, including one or two doctors who process 53 patients per day. Doctors spend 20% of their time with administrative tasks, and 70% of total team time is spent on repetitive work like logging meetings, filling out forms or tracing bills (Kassenärztliche Bundesvereinigung (KBV), 2018). Affording each patient a personalized, caring experience under these circumstances is nearly impossible.

Fast-Forwarding Primary Care into the 21st Century

Just like the team at Doctorly, we are convinced that doctors can only win on the front line with a top-notch back-end.

To this end, Doctorly’s cloud-driven, next-generation practice management software (PMS) solution combines modern CRM services and user-friendly UX/UI workflows in order to automate key administrative tasks, simplify staff management, streamline billing and ease overall patient flow. The end result is a reduced administrative burden and more time devoted to the needs of each individual patient.

Why We’re Excited About this Opportunity, Product and Team

Scaling Quality Healthcare by Getting Simple Things Right

There’s a lot of justified excitement in tech around personalized medicine, digital therapeutics and other cutting-edge medical advances. But our view is that making high-quality healthcare available at scale first depends on getting the mundane aspects of healthcare management right. Seeing as practice management software is the central nervous system for outpatient care delivery, Doctorly addresses one of the key factors in improving medical outcomes and operational efficiency.

Crossing the Regulatory Moat Creates Defensibility

Doctorly’s initial focus is on the front line of Germany’s healthcare system: public general practitioners or Hausärzte. Overall, >75% of € 38 billion outpatient revenue in Germany is publicly funded (KBV, 2019). In this highly regulated market, only practice software certified by the KBV — the umbrella organization of all outpatient clinicians in Germany — can be used to process public insurance claims. Getting certified is a lengthy process that requires laser focus, patience and a deep understanding of how to fit a great product into a very specific rule set — for example, this 136-page technical guidance on how to print handouts. Doctorly has made significant regulatory strides and is ready to cross a moat that only a few have crossed before.

Regulated Practice Software: A Market Ripe for Disruption

More than 80% of the 130,000 medical practices in Germany use decades-old PMS systems controlled by an inflexible and outdated duopoly of providers. Doctorly’s convenient solution, with its easy-to-use UI/UX and outstanding customer service, meets the needs of a new generation of doctors who are frustrated by the status quo. This first generation of “digital doctors” is no longer content with systems that employ confusing price models, treat customer service as an expensive extra and are just simply painful to use.

Product Vision: Building a Hub for Outpatient Care

Doctorly’s product vision is much bigger than just being better practice software. Its central position in doctors’ practices will allow Doctorly to become a focal point for a larger digital health ecosystem. Further down the road, natural extensions of the platform will include an app for patients to directly access their medical records, for example after an onward referral, and an open platform that gives doctors access to other interesting cloud solutions that can improve their daily workflows.

The Team to Tie it All Together

Entering a heavily regulated market with outsized incumbents and the real possibility of challenging stumbling blocks down the road requires a team with extraordinary experience, resilience and execution capacity. Doctorly has six (yes, six) co-founders with extremely relevant prior experiences as founders, entrepreneurs or leading employees in insurance, salesforce integration, high-volume consumer start-ups and — almost boringly — medicine. With strong leadership by CEO Samir El-Alami and COO Nicklas Teicke, this setup has allowed Doctorly to engage effectively with a slow-moving bureaucracy, win an award for digital health innovation and simultaneously engage with >600 GPs to funnel pain points and feature needs into a well-balanced product roadmap.

We’re extremely excited, alongside our friends at Target Global, Uniqa Ventures, Seedcamp, Calm/Storm and P&P, to support the Doctorly team on their journey to fast-forward primary care.

You could be part of the ride: Doctorly is hiring in Berlin, apply here.

Read More at: tech.eu.

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