Suppose you need elective surgery, but your local hospitals can’t provide the procedure, can’t do it in a reasonable amount of time or charge more than you can afford.
Archimedicx, a new global search engine, lets you find the top-ranked hospitals for your specific procedure within limits you set for time, place, cost and language spoken.
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If the hospital you choose from the algorithmic results has a contract with Archimedicx – so far, about half of them do — you can use the site’s secure HIPAA-compliant interface to contact and send records directly to the person responsible for arranging the procedure.
Archimedicx is like the medical equivalent of booking.com for finding the right hotel, Airbnb for locating a good vacation apartment or Waze for finding the best directions, says Chief Marketing Officer Guy Klajman.
“Where to get healthcare is much more crucial than any of these other verticals, and we believe Archimedicx could open a whole new market by providing access to information you can find in a split second, ” Klajman tells ISRAEL21c.
The site is free of charge; the company earns a percentage from hospitals for every successful referral, where permitted by law. “It’s a pure performance-based model, ” says Klajman. “We plan to disrupt the market because up to now all players in the field of medical tourism send patients to a hospital with which they have an agreement. With us, the user makes the choice.”
Medical tourism is burgeoning internationally — even among Americans and Brits, who have access to excellent hospitals but can get elective procedures done more cheaply or more quickly elsewhere. “Globally, over 50 million people travel abroad to get medical care, ” says Klajman.
Officially launched in September at the DLD Innovation Festival in Tel Aviv, Archimedicx was the brainchild of Moni Milchman, a retired Israeli living in Belgium.
Milchman was in the business of building and setting up hospitals in Eastern Europe and Africa. Friends and family frequently contacted him asking for suggestions for the best hospitals for medical procedures, which seemed strange to him in light of the proliferation of generic global search engines.
This gave him the idea of starting a scientific and unbiased hospital recommendation engine specific to each type of medical procedure or condition, explains Klajman.
Milchman acquired healthcare big-data firm Quomeda, moved it to Antwerp and had a team of researchers gather millions of data points on hospital performance in areas such as postop infection and readmission rates.
“We use various sources of data to assure accuracy, and then assign a weight to each parameter, using unique algorithms to determine information about hospital stays, results and experiences. With that technology we are able to put together a very accurate picture of what patients’ experience, ” says Klajman.
The Archimedicx algorithm, developed in Israel, identifies, evaluates and compares the different parameters to present a reliable score for each hospital. The methodology is certified by HIMSS Europe, a subsidiary of a global nonprofit focused on better health through information technology.
Goal is 1, 000 listed hospitals
The site launched with about 300 listed hospitals. “We’re going for worldwide coverage. By the end of the year we want to sign with the top 1, 000 hospitals in every elective medical procedure we cover, ” Klajman says. “We want to rank the leading academic hospitals regardless of whether they have an agreement with us.
Hospitals do not pay to be listed on the database and can only improve ranking by improving their metrics. However, Klajman reports, “Hospitals are embracing us because they’re looking for an objective party to increase medical tourism.”
“We plan to disrupt the market because up to now all players in the field of medical tourism send patients to a hospital with which they have an agreement. With us, the user makes the choice.”
Hospitals that want potential patients to contact them through the site must sign an agreement with Archimedicx guaranteeing that they have the infrastructure to accept patients from abroad.
Klajman points out that the service acts as a free second opinion, because no hospital will accept a patient before confirming the diagnosis entered in the original search.
Archimedicx takes responsibility for its rankings but bears no liability with respect to the diagnosis entered by the user, or for the actual treatment. Any complaints are handled by the chosen hospital.
Just before launching, Archimedicx completed a second investment round with “significant oversubscription, ” says Klajman. Its investors are all private, led by Ron Zuckerman of California and Robert Taub of Belgium, who previously invested in Israeli companies including Lifebond.
“There was not one investor I approached over past seven months who didn’t see the clear need for such a site, ” says Klajman.
The company has employees in Israel, Belgium and Latvia, as well as 10 senior managers spread across the globe focused mainly on signing up hospitals.
Archimedicx is also looking to add vendors for related services, such as flights, accommodations, financing, medical insurance, nursing services, prescription drugs and physiotherapy.
