Connect is a startup focusing on digital tools for the medical market, notably ‘healzcare.org,’ which streamlines medical tourism services through a single marketplace, addressing challenges such as connecting international patients with Georgian clinics and ensuring transparency in financial transactions. The startup aims to mitigate issues like shadow accounting and bureaucratic hurdles by providing a comprehensive platform that integrates medical services and logistical support. Accessible through healzcare.org, the startup plans to launch in the summer, with future goals including refining the product, securing investments, and participating in the Hult Prize 2024 competition, aligning itself with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
To find out more, GEORGIA TODAY talked to Levan Tchanukvadze, CEO and co-founder of healzcare.org.
“Our startup ‘Connect’ is focused on creating new, digital tools and platforms for the medical market,” he says. “Today, our main project is ‘healzcare.org,’ which makes it easier to get medical tourism services, by creating a single marketplace. At healzcare.org, international patients have the opportunity to search for the medical services they want across borders, in different countries, and with the help of our artificial intelligence, generate a complete package that includes both the logistical and financial parts.”
Tell us about the general challenges faced by healthcare services in the Georgian market.
In general, in Georgia, as well as worldwide, medical tourism is a new direction, which developed and increased in demand especially since the Covid pandemic. In our country, we have a number of high-level medical organizations that can compete in specific fields with any premier foreign clinic, however, the issue is connecting foreign patients and these Georgian medical organizations: There is no common platform where both sides can find each other. Also, even more alarming is the situation that often happens to foreign patients on the part of Georgian organizations, called “shadow accounting”, when individual doctors of an organization dishonestly use the trust of foreign patients and arbitrarily add various fees.
The fact that it is quite difficult to organize all the services associated with medical tourism, including legal and bureaucratic assistance, etc., is also very important.
How does your startup seek to overcome these challenges?
To solve these challenges, we create a common marketplace where we connect international patients with clinics in different countries and provide all additional services. We already have both medical and other field organizations as partners, and we combine all services in one package with only one payment, which also ensures financial transparency and reliability.
When will access to your services be available?
Our service will be available in early summer at healzcare.org, where both patients and organizations can sign up. For companies, that is, for our partners, there is an additional platform, a module, where numerous advanced digital tools are available, which makes it easier for them to manage operations and patient data.
Tell us about your future plans.
Our future plans are primarily for the market launch, which we plan to do in the summer. At the same time, we are working on attracting investment to further refine our product, start marketing activities, and bring the product to its final form.
In the summer, we will participate in the Hult Prize 2024 global competition, where a Georgian startup in our form was selected for the very first time. To reach this stage, we had to overcome quite a few barriers and in doing so achieved many victories!
This competition includes, in addition to the competition itself, an acceleration program. The project is intended for startups founded by students and is organized by the United Nations together with the Hult Foundation. To participate in it, the startup must be related to one of the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations, which we very proudly are!
Interview by Mariam Mtivlishvili
