June 12, 2023
This time a week ago the DHF opened its doors to thousands of Australian health professionals and hundreds of vendors supplying the health sector in Australia. Amongst them was a contingent of Kiwi’s including health professionals and companies wanting to learn more about what is happening in Australia and to share what is happening in NZ.
Spritely was lucky enough to be included in the NZ Pavilion, which was organised by the team at New Zealand Trade and Enterprise. We had a fantastic location near the entrance and conveniently adjacent to a furnished lounge/meeting area. The whole exercise was a great success for us on several levels. This blog identifies three key areas where Spritely saw value in attending. It might be helpful for other companies thinking of attending next year.
Firstly, we were able to meet the team at NZTE and learn more about how they can help us to raise the profile of Spritely in Australia. We have been working with a range of customers in the NZ health sector for over three years. Honing the proposition and the product and developing the capability needed to support equity-led telemonitoring at scale (more on that later).
Now we are actively seeking our first Australian customer and it was great to hear from the team at NZTE about how they can help us.
Secondly, we were able to gain a good understanding of the landscape for remote patient monitoring vendors in Australia. We personally met other vendors in this space at the conference and discussed how our products compared and I’m pleased to say we were unique. Of course, we all did the normal remote patient monitoring things you would expect. Things like video calls, messaging, surveys, health vitals monitoring and reminders as well patient education content, well most RPM products did, however, they all had something else in common as well.
Every single RPM solution or consumer device-based monitoring product we encountered required the patient to have a smartphone, download and set up an app from the app store, pair a Bluetooth device and connect to the internet using their own data. That might sound simple to many people reading this, but for a lot of patients who can benefit from telemonitoring, it’s not.
This was confirmed by a lot of healthcare professionals that attended our stand. Every nurse involved in RPM projects had numerous “war stories” about the difficulties they encountered when patients were required to set everything up themselves on their own device. Clinicians were frustrated at the level of “tech support” that unfortunately has become synonymous with RPM. Our “Equity-led” approach to telemonitoring directly addresses these issues.
Thirdly, we learnt a lot by listening to healthcare professionals to determine if Spritely is a good fit for the Australian market. I lost count of the number that approached our stand because they were curious about what we meant by “Equity-led Telemonitoring”.
We focused on the “equity-led” aspect of our product because this is what we do differently. The idea that you provide everything needed for instant connection to the patient from a distance with no set up required by the patient and deployed in less than 3 minutes, was music to the ears of many people we spoke to. Making RPM not only simple to use but incredibly simple to access, is the key to driving engagement with RPM programs.
Spritely’s secret sauce is the ability to do this at scale. It’s not easy and it’s taken us over three years to get to the point where many nurses, from different specialties, at multiple hospitals can deploy hundreds of tablets each to support the health of thousands and thousands of patients at home, who would otherwise struggle to engage with RPM programs. The more people we listened to, the more certain we were that the real-world problems we solve in NZ right now, also need solving in Australia.
For people that couldn’t attend the festival or didn’t make it to our stand, I have put our brochure pack online here. Feel free to get in touch with me directly if you want to know more, or even see an online demo of exactly what we do and how it can help patients and clinicians.
We are in the process of following up leads with Australian prospects now and look forward to learning more about the Australian market as we do. For other NZ companies thinking about attending the Digital Health Festival with NZTE next year – then it comes highly recommended by Spritely.
