Over the past few years and specially in the past few months, telemedicine and telehealth solutions have found themselves in favor from both patients and medical practitioners. If trends are to be believed, telehealth solutions are poised for more growth and a stronger presence.
France-based Qare is among the prominent providers of care and telehealth solutions. Qare’s mission is to give patients better access to quality healthcare, through a comprehensive digital healthcare platform that answers patients’ needs.
The company leverages technology to enhance the quality of care. Serving patients, physicians and organisations in France, it offers the best integrated care possible. Qare addresses this through teleconsultations 7/7, of course, but also by working on prevention and follow-up. It also provides, through enterprises, healthcare programs that address specific needs.
More about Qare from Oliver Thierry, President & CEO through the following interview.
What are the prominent solutions and products, that make your company stand out from the competition?
Qare is the truly « medical approach » telemedicine service. For patients, leveraging telemedicine, Qare provides better healthcare services to patients who need it through:
- A large pool of quality, diverse health professionals assembled, continuously trained and coached.
- A superior teleconsultation product through great user experience and feature-depth.
- A good understanding and management of the patient, through unified patients’ medical record, data collection and mining.
Our healthcare practitioners are a key part of our service, they are our cornerstone provider. We enlist quality healthcare professionals that we train, support and follow, in order for them to deliver the best possible quality medical service through our solution. We cater to physicians that are ready to commit sizable time and effort to patients using Qare. Qare attracts liberal and non-liberal healthcare professionals alike.
Qare will complement it’s telemedicine strategy by a territorial presence strategy, through its own Healthcare Centers, in order to enable genuine online-to-offline offer. Virtual first, but with the possibility of an in-person follow-up when necessary, thus contributing to its better healthcare value proposition.
This goes together with the deployment of Qare’s telemedicine offering in local points of care – such as pharmacies, that will enable assisted teleconsultations and enhance remote medicine for a better care all over the country.
Taking into consideration, the current pandemic, and its impact on global economies, how are you driving your organization to sustain operations and ensuring safety of your employees at the same time?
From an operational standpoint, we have everybody in our teams working from home for some time. Our offices in Paris remain opened for those who prefer to go to work (but this is not mandatory). Wearing a mask is required at all times in our offices, and there can be no more than 30 % of employees at the same time.
While this is expected to be less optimal for collaboration, we estimate that our business will not be materially adversely affected, since ours is a service, technology and knowledge business.
We work closely with all the managers to maintain and grow social relationships amongst all the teams, even remotely, since we had to scale-up very fast since the beginning of the pandemic.
What do you think could be the future of Telehealth technologies and solutions market post the COVID-19 pandemic?
What we’re seeing is that a lot of people and companies, who previously were hesitant about adopting this new healthcare practice and possibly were not viewing it as an urgent need, are now jumping in without hesitation.
Telehealth has gained a lot of media attention too, meaning now every patient and physician knows what is it, what are the benefits of it and what are the key providers in France (amongst whom Qare).
From a business standpoint, this has increased the volume of our activity a lot, stretching our teams. We were already in a strong, double-digit, month-over-month growth, but the pandemic has increased our growth by an additional 25 percentage points roughly.
We observe a strong increase of teleconsultations across all specialties, which shows that people are not just going to teleconsultation for matters related to the Covid-19 but mainly for other matters, adopting the teleconsultation practice as a whole. We also observed that older patients (50+ years old) turn to telehealth.
What would be your advice to the emerging entrepreneurs aspiring to enter into the healthcare industry?
There is probably no better mission. Be advised, though, that things take time, in this space, that conservatism and regulatory barriers are many, and that you need to be patient for things to happen. The time frames are longer than in other industries. And no matter how creative or bold you are, you will need to remain cautious and thorough. Because of its potentially high-impact on people’s life, you cannot cut corners and play it like an amateur.
Where do you envision your organization to be in the long run and what are your future goals?
We will further build on already existing assets that differentiate us from other players:
- A strong brand which relies on superior and qualitative user experience for patients and physicians, through an emphasis on…
- Product development
- Support services (both for patients and physicians)
- Training & coaching (of physicians)
- A close monitoring of operations, quality and satisfaction along the whole user experience chain.
- A definitive “medical” positioning and capabilities, through the involvement of doctors in the design of our roadmap of services and in all major or ongoing decisions made by the company, as has been the case since the beginning.
- Partnering with other players in the medical and health-tech world, in order to enhance our value proposition and to extend our reach.
- Emphasizing certain specialties, such as mental health, and developing health packages and programs for specific life moments or conditions.
- Decision-making support tools, information and transparency for patients and doctors, helping them to make the right choices by and for themselves. A strong emphasis on data mining and insights.
About the Leader
Olivier Thierry, President & CEO, Qare, has had more than 20 years of experience in high-tech, high-growth companies. He grew up with doctors in his family and it was important to him to work in a company that helps people improve their way of life. Health is the main driver of people’s quality of life and happiness. There is no more important goal.
Before Qare, Olivier was COO and B2B Director of TheFork & TripAdvisor Restaurants, and before that, Global VP in tele-sales at SAP. He started his career at McKinsey, working on four continents, more specifically in Media, Telecom, and Corporate Finance / M&A & Private Equity.
