For the first time in the history of mankind, a health crisis has shut down the entire world, painfully exposing the gaps of the healthcare sector. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic shackled the world with its devastating waves.
For most countries without adequate healthcare infrastructure, access to appropriate healthcare became difficult. The pandemic with its overwhelming impact, exposed loopholes within the healthcare space, highlighting that it was not made for such crises. However, the silver line of the pandemic was that it paved the way for many healthcare companies to enhance their services.
For every successful healthcare company, ensuring access to health services is the cornerstone of accomplishment, and Qured is committed to providing this health response with its expert care services. Qured is a healthcare company that provides a human solution for every aspect of people’s wellbeing that boosts overall health and productivity.
In an interview with Insights Care, Alex Templeton, the CEO and Founder of Qured gives us detailed insights about his company, its values, and how it is changing the landscapes of the healthcare sector. Below are the highlights of the interview:
Please brief our audience about Qured, its values, mission, and the aspects that make it a global healthcare brand.
Qured provides access to expert care and testing at your fingertips. We empower people with the data they need to manage their own health and wellbeing. We believe that a patient experience which is tailored to you as an individual, encourages regular engagement, generating better health data, which in turn increases our ability to create truly personalized care.
This virtuous circle drives our mission to help our patients preserve good health and avoid disease, guiding them to early interventions, to help them live longer, healthier lives. We want to help people experience the joy of living for more years and we want to bring some of this sense of joy to the experience of healthcare.
Qured started as an on-demand healthcare service in London more than five years ago; providing healthcare services to both individuals and hundreds of business customers across the UK across a range of industries, from finance to sport and media. Employees were able to benefit from in-person practitioner visits to the workplace or at home, driving engagement and retention.
During the pandemic and lockdown, our core services were less needed but, to serve huge demand from our patients for COVID-19 testing, we pivoted towards these services, and became pioneers in at-home COVID-19 testing, later launching an innovative remotely observed rapid antigen travel test.
We are now one of the largest and well-regarded COVID-19 testing providers in the UK and have recently launched a testing service in the US, where we are working with a range of corporations to provide their employees with reliable COVID-19 testing for a safe return to the workplace and events, and with airlines such as American Airlines, to provide discounted travel testing for passengers.
Tell us more about your offerings and the aspects that make Qured different from its competitors.
We were one of the first healthcare companies in the UK to provide an on-demand healthcare service to businesses and their employees. Using our proprietary technology, we could help employees to book healthcare appointments at times and in locations that suited them. Enabling more people to see a medical professional during the working day and helping employers promote staff wellbeing, engagement, and retention.
As a COVID-19 testing provider, we have invested heavily in creating reliable and safe COVID-19 testing for people to use at home or in the safety of their hotel room when travelling abroad. Someone can take the test overseen by a health advisor, submit their sample, and receive their results in less than two hours. Our testing capacity has grown significantly over the past 15 months, and we now test thousands of samples per day.
Through our partnerships with airlines and airports, such as British Airways and Heathrow, we are providing people with reliable testing at a very competitive price, enabling more people to enjoy holidays and reunite with friends and family safely.
What is your opinion on the impact of the current pandemic on the global healthcare sector, and what challenges did you face during the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns?
The pandemic has had a significant impact on every part of the healthcare sector, driving demand while limiting capacity, and creating large backlogs for payers and providers. In response, we have seen the pandemic driving rapid adoption of remote care models.
In terms of the impact on Qured, as mentioned earlier, we had to pivot more-or-less overnight as the whole of the UK went into lockdown and people were unable to access COVID-19 testing or safely see health practitioners face-to-face. While people were wary of visiting the doctor’s office and sitting in waiting rooms where the virus could be spreading, we did not feel that we were able to safely continue with our core home health model, despite the increased demand we were seeing.
We had to review our business model very quickly and completely rethink our operational delivery. Our mission has always been to help people access medical care quickly and easily. In the world’s response to the pandemic, we saw a huge unmet need in the shape of COVID-19 testing, coupled with remote care, particularly in the earliest stages when people were desperate for practical advice and reassurance.
We wanted to use our healthcare expertise to make COVID-19 testing accessible to all and at the lowest possible cost for those people who needed it most. We then saw huge demand for testing from people who needed to confirm their negative COVID-19 status to do other things safely, such as returning to the workplace or travelling.
With constant development in technologies, in your opinion, what could be the future of the healthcare industry, and how are you planning to adapt to that future?
With the UK and US now out of lockdown and with society opening, we believe there is a great opportunity for the whole of the healthcare sector – public and private – to look at new and innovative ways of providing healthcare to the populations they serve.
Remote care is here to stay and is being embraced by both healthcare providers and patients. While technology has an important role to play in providing better and more accessible treatment, much diagnosis and treatments still require an in-person or physically delivered element, for example for hand-on observations or blood draws. We therefore expect more hybrid digital-physical care models to emerge, to deliver the greatest value to both individual patients and wider healthcare systems.
To provide the care needed to ageing populations in many parts of the world, healthcare will need to move towards health preservation, rather than expensive interventions, to go preventative rather than reactive care. The care model of the future will be predictive, preventative, and participative, which will drive true personalization of care and better outcomes for societies, individuals, and health systems.
As an established leader, what would be your advice to the budding entrepreneurs and professionals aspiring to venture into the healthcare space?
You must gain a good understanding of the healthcare space you wish to enter, particularly around the needs you will be meeting and who will pay for your solution if it meets them. Do your homework about the regulations and legislation around setting up a healthcare company, it’s well-regulated for a reason but don’t be put off by it: there has never been a better time to bring innovation to the space, or willingness to accept it.
Seek advice and mentorships from those who have built successful models and companies and, while you will always need the support and guidance of medical practitioners, you should always keep the patient at the heart of everything you do.
Health is critically important to every one of us and caring for and helping people should be at the core of your values. There are few sectors where you will find such a great sense of purpose or have the opportunity to make a positive impact on people’s lives.
How do you envision scaling your organization’s operations and offerings in 2022?
We are looking to increase our COVID-19 testing provision further into the US and into other healthcare markets. We believe that people will need access to reliable and convenient testing for some time to come, to be able to do the things they love, safely. In providing this, we are building a large customer base for the future, and we are working on an exciting patient-centered quantified wellness offering to help support their health post pandemic.
Please share the awards and recognitions that your organization has received so far since its inception.
We were one of the first accredited COVID-19 testing providers listed by the UK government to provide tests for travel and were invited to become founding members and part of the advisory board for the Laboratory Testing Industry Organization, which is dedicated to driving up standards across the testing industry. We have been trusted by companies and groups from Premier League football clubs to British Airways to provide high quality testing services to their employees and customers.
About the Leader
Alex Templeton is Qured’s CEO and founder. Alex is a passionate patient advocate, having struggled to access timely care for his family when it was most needed. Alex was determined to create a model of care which delivered the access and convenience of an on-demand platform, with the kind of customer experience one just doesn’t get in healthcare. By building a great team of people who shared this vision, Qured has been able to reach hundreds of thousands of patients in the UK. Alex’s core belief is that if you put the patient at the heart of everything that you do, the rest will take care of itself.
