A tiny 33-person UK startup built a video chat tool for doctors and patients over a weekend and it's absolutely exploded
Healthcare messaging service AccuRx has seen "crazy" demand in recent months since the UK went into lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic.
AccuRx offers ways for doctors to talk to patients via SMS or, more recently, via video call and is beloved by practitioners for its simplicity.
Prior to the crisis, AccuRx was in 40% of practices. Now the startup is in 90% of practices and built its video calling system for doctors and patients over a weekend.
"We wanted to build a solution after reading about black swan events on a Friday and had a product tested and ready to go on the Monday afternoon," AccuRx CEO and cofounder Jacob Haddad told Business Insider in an interview. "Healthcare is a communications industry so now we've built all the features we've wanted to build for ages."
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A 33-person healthcare startup is revolutionizing how British doctors speak to patients during the coronavirus, outgunning well-funded, buzzy competitors.
London-based startup AccuRx provides methods for doctors to talk to patients via SMS or video calls, and says it is seeing "crazy" demand after the UK went into lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Prior to the crisis, AccuRx's services were available in 40% of practices. Now the startup is in 90% of practices, and the firm built a video calling system for doctors and patients over a weekend in early March.
Doctors rave about its products publicly on Twitter. "Thank you @accuRx for developing such an impressive tool for us in general practice. It's been brilliant!" wrote one doctor based in the Midlands.
"We wanted to build a solution after reading about black swan events on a Friday and had a product tested and ready to go on the Monday afternoon," AccuRx CEO and cofounder Jacob Haddad told Business Insider in an interview. "Healthcare is a communications industry so now we've built all the features we've wanted to build for ages."
Since it launched video calling, AccuRx's new feature has had an average of 35,000 consultations a day.
Something doctors praise is the simplicity of AccuRx's product. While other big health startups such as Babylon Health pitch AI-based tools, AccuRx has kept its product tightly focused.
"We're proud that our core product is embarrassingly simple," Haddad added. "When we realised that people needed to be called to see if they had been abroad to avoid face-to-face contact, we wanted to provide a solution."
The team was able to scale quickly because of the trust built up from the work done to ensure its core messaging platform worked flawlessly, Haddad claimed.
"When we first released SMS messaging for GPs in 2018 we spent the next year ensuring that it would work on any device, with slow internet, or even with different access privileges so we know how to make the simple stuff work," he said.
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