Ireland-Australia Digital Health Exchange Wrap Day 4

Kieran Daly , CTO and Co-Founder of HealthBeacon , talked us through the learnings from the HealthBeacon journey – they are now active in the US, Europe and UK and attribute success to being patient-focussed, listening to patients and the power of design.

“Stickiness and patient engagement is key. Delight on day one is as essential as on day 1001.”

“A digital health business can never do enough design thinking.”

The animated and inspirational?Dr Wilby Williamson , Clinical Director of Integrated Care at Vhi , energised us for Ireland, highlighting the stable economy, and the small social distance to change-makers, and challenging us all to think big and improve inequalities, lifting us up to be better ancestors and less individualistic.?

We have heard how flat and collegiate?Ireland is, so it was wonderful to have Donagh Keirnan, CEO and Co-Founder of Tenego Academy , talk to us about how to successfully enter the market using partnership and provide us with a systematic methodology of partnering.

He outlined a methodology and his tips included considering where your needs lie:

• Perhaps you will share customers with your partner, as well as partner with your customers. Either way, you must be clear on who your target customer is, to understand them and the ecosystem around them.
• Perhaps you want to have more leads, then you want a partner who will generate credible, high-quality leads.
• Perhaps you want to close sales, then you want a partner who can help you close the sales or overcome the issues you’re having closing sales.
• Perhaps you want to deliver on an existing customer pipeline, and you partner for the delivery.
• Perhaps you want to improve your client success and might white-label another service into yours or integrate with another system.

He recommended quantifying how much each of the steps costs you (e.g., how much it costs per lead or how much it costs you to secure a customer) to help with valuing and negotiating your partnership.

“Alignment is the most important. THE most common reason for partnerships to fail is lack of alignment.”

Final Tip: Trade fairs remain the best place to meet people and with Europe and Ireland being relationship-based economies, face-to-face meetings and relationships will continue to will be important.

In the relationship-heavy business culture of Ireland, it was also terrific to have the opportunity to meet David Cullinane , Assistant Principal Officer in the Department of Health, who provided us with detailed information on health spend in Ireland and alternative budgets in the Funding Fairer Healthcare report by Sinn Féin.