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Doctorly, the startup that knows how to modernise medical practices

Cutting bridges with a past outdated by new technologies and implementing modern solutions to free doctors from administrative tasks while improving patient service. This is the goal pursued by thousands of startups across Europe, enabling Doctorly to close a $10 million Series A round led by major market players.

The young German company aims to help medical practices collect data and process medical records. But that’s not all, because the software developed by the Berlin-based startup also saves medical professionals valuable time for prescriptions, billing, appointment management, and interoperability with medical devices and laboratories connected to the basic structure.

For the many who do not know, it will undoubtedly come as a surprise to discover that a large number of medical practices in Germany are still tied to a DOS-based system for managing patient information. According to Doctorly itself, there are about 130,000 facilities still struggling with software launched in 1987. Thirty-six years later, technology has transformed many industries, as well as our daily lives, so it is time for the medical field to modernise as well to ensure more efficient performance and a reduction in time for doctors in terms of administrative tasks and for patients in terms of accessing and managing their practices.

Care Sector

“Since inception, we have been working closely with doctors and healthcare professionals to develop a new operating system for the entire primary care sector,” says Samir El-Alami, CEO and co-founder of Doctorly. Founded in 2018, Doctorly promises to make up for lost time with a cloud-based solution that allows access to a patient’s medical record to multiple physicians to gain time for analysis and the planning of care pathways and possible interventions. Because if not only the general practitioner but also the urologist, gynaecologist and paediatrician can quickly find out about the patient’s health status, the benefits are for everyone, starting with the patient himself.

“Working hand-in-hand with specialists in the field has enabled us to build a practice management system that is modern, easy to use, secure and connects with other modern technologies,” El-Alami explains, pointing out that Doctorly is currently the first and only VC-backed startup to have the necessary regulatory approvals to sell the software to German medical practices.

This is where another predominant factor comes into play, hence the lag that healthcare lags behind the speed with which other sectors are transforming by virtue of the time it takes to validate solutions and software that require a large amount of study, research and investment to achieve security certainty. There are many regulations to be complied with in terms of sensitive data before being able to reach the market, and the example comes from Doctorly itself, which took four years to obtain authorisation from the Kassenärztliche Bundesvereinigung (KBV, the German body that regulates the medical-health sector) to put its product on sale.

Medical Practises

To understand, however, how important it is to accelerate the digital health transformation in Germany, one only has to consider that according to the KVB, medical practices spend around 61 working days per year on repetitive administrative tasks. Reducing this figure by dedicating the time saved by specialists to examinations and interventions would be a significant breakthrough for everyone. For El-Alami, the issue is vital and can no longer be put off: “Almost all medical practices still use a local network with paper and physical disks to store and transfer data. Doctorly allows medical practices to use cloud computing by providing first-class data security and privacy protection”.

Among the investors betting on the Berlin-based startup is Canadian healthcare giant Well Health Technologies and Horizons Ventures, the investment group of Li Ka-Shing, Hong Kong’s richest man with a fortune estimated by Forbes at $33.9 billion. Doctorly will use the capital injection to speed up growth in Germany, improving the software aimed at doctors and creating a sales and marketing team. Only later will consideration be given to expanding to other European countries.

Active in an industry searching for technological breakthroughs, Doctorly is one of the startups attracting investors’ interest, ready to pump money into promising ideas to change the status quo. In the UK, Accurx has developed a communication platform for healthcare professionals and patients and raised more than £27.5 million in September 2021, while in France, Doctolib is further ahead, ready to add billing and medical records access options to its booking management software. For this, it closed a $549m round last year.

Alessio Caprodossi is a technology, sports, and lifestyle journalist. He navigates between three areas of expertise, telling stories, experiences, and innovations to understand how the world is shifting. You can follow him on Twitter (@alecap23) and Instagram (Alessio Caprodossi) to report projects and initiatives on startups, sustainability, digital nomads, and web3.