Exploring the Challenges of Building the Health Tech Landscape in Romania

Author: Elena Vrabie

What are health tech startup founders’ challenges? What programs are there available to drive growth? How can we digitalize the health market? And can there be a collaboration between public and private parties to drive the evolution of the medtech startup ecosystem??

Last week, Launch Romania , a prominent support system for aspiring Romanian startup founders and tech enthusiasts, orchestrated an event on the 18th of May, inaugurating a new chapter, Launch Health Tech, in the vibrant city of Bucharest.

The event was hosted by Diana Mereu , co-founder of HealthFluencer, an AI project that connects healthcare brands with the right ambassadors, and Director of the new Launch innovative initiative.?

“The first edition of the event showed us how much potential there is for innovation and collaboration in the field of health technology in Romania. It was an afternoon full of energy, ideas, discussions and debates, new opportunities for startups, and more. We continue to support the health tech ecosystem through Launch and look forward to the second edition of the event!” - Diana Mereu

Discover below 7 takeaways from the first edition of Launch Health Tech.?

7 takeaways from the #1 Launch Health Tech event

• One thing that pops into my mind from the event is Lucian Paraschiv from MedStarter Hub 's reflections on scalability in the healthcare sector. It is challenging to achieve local scalability without harnessing the power of public hospital data.?
• On another note, Sergiu Negut - this time wearing the co-founder of cleverage.vc ’s hat, an investors’ group with experience and focus in the healthcare sector, shared that constructing a substantial health company within a local context is a formidable challenge, and one must embrace a global mindset from the beginning.?
• On this note, there are quite a few initiatives that are supporting startups to scale internationally. One of them is the accelerator InnovX BCR, which has taken its recent cohort to the Select USA Summit to grow its network.?

* Roxana Sabau , a co-founder of Cluj-based Synaptiq.io , which is developing an AI-driven radiotherapy solution, was part of this delegation. She revealed that the program was valuable for their go-to-market strategy as they are busy getting their EU & US certifications, searching for international partners, and thinking about a new funding opportunity.

• Another intriguing prospect was presented by Daniel Stan , co-founder of Femyo , a Bucharest-based medical appointments project targeting family doctors. He shared that the medical system in Romania will be part of the Wharton Global Modular Courses. This will allow local founders the opportunity to pitch to over 40 experts from the US and get constructive feedback from them to grow their businesses.
• And speaking of feedback, during my panel with Mihai Bran and Alexandra Popescu-Zorica, ACIM, Alumni from wellness startup Hilio - hilio.com (former ATLAS), and their corporate client Oana Ilie from Tazz , I discovered how important it is to be open to your client’s feedback, adapt, and grow. Their transparent story offered insights into how their tool wasn’t used by the corporates’ employees and how they had a challenge on their hands: raising engagement for a diverse team.?

“TAZZ was an atypical client, with young employees, a tech-driven company, oriented towards numbers, and data. But TAZZ is one of the clients that led to the improvement of our offer. The success of a startup is based, among other things, on ‘hiring the right customer’. And this ideal customer is the one who gives you feedback and pushes you towards an even better version of your product.” - Alexandra Zorica, CGO at Hilio

• Coming to the data topic, this is the “new oil” in the years to come. And, apparently, Timisoara is a good zipcode for health startups.?

* Adina Wanda Fiat from Timisoara-based MediNav wants to support tech professionals to digitize their health data with smart templates and transcribe conversations through a speech-to-tech tool, for which they are currently fundraising;?

*Another Timisoara-based founder, Roxana Margan , has announced a group of digital tools for the healthcare industry, titled Originis . While she is known for the project Oncochain, a research source to find the right candidates and where doctors can join studies in safe environments, she also launched the Mediflux tool which is a patient digitization software.

*And then there is also AiGIA Health , co-founded by Bucharest-based Alex Diaconu , which is targeting the US market and investors. The team offers patients the possibility to regain control over their data so that hospitals don’t own it, and monetize it. The B2B2C’s actual goal is customer health prevention.

• This leads us to my final note. Customer health prevention through AI data analyzing tools is the main trend that everybody is talking about in the health sphere these days.?

*At the event, we witnessed both a veteran and a newbie present prevention tools:

Rayscape , formerly XVision, is another Timisoara-based startup that offers digital assistants to radiologists.

While upgrade.health is a newcomer that aggregates data from different sources to create a digital twin and offer constructive feedback to improve one’s health.

Looking forward to the second edition of Launch Health Tech that will follow this fall, as a How to Web conference satellite event, on the 3rd of October.?