On Rebuilding the Future Of Medical Imaging: Mircea Popa, Medicai Co-Founder

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

My adventure in healthcare started in 2011 when, with a friend of mine, I founded a company that is now called SkinVision, a skin cancer screening app. I was responsible for product and research so that is where I’ve gathered most of my experience in healthcare and got a first hand view of the challenges.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

Medicai is the name of the startup and it is a web based medical imaging platform that changes the way doctors and patients coordinate care, especially for chronic or rare conditions that require handling of complex medical data - i.e. imaging, digital pathology etc

What is the origin story?

In 2018 I wanted to do something else after I left my first company. I gathered a team made up of people I worked with in the past and we started exploring. We have experience in computer vision and AI so medical imaging made sense but when we started talking to stakeholders we realised we were surrounded by CDs (which don’t really mix with AI).

We started looking into why this is still happening and realised we could make a big difference by changing the way doctors and patients interact. The question actually is: how would interactions between doctors and patients change if had an online tool that allows instant collaboration on those “data sets” - i.e. what if, as a patient, I could view/edit my MRI scan together with my doctor directly online?

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

I feel we have reached a point where everyone is aligned in doing what is best for the company and we can now focus on that. I believe culture is crucial and we managed to create an open and inclusive environment that can help us build to last.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

Building another startup?

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

We are still very much in the product building phase so we measure engagement and usage. We want a great product so we focus on what our users want and need. Any KPI that can help us better understand what our users want/need is important so DAU/MAU, time spent on avg. - that type of thing

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

We see a lot of doctors using the platform every day for multiple hours. Doctors are notoriously difficult to convert and that’s why we’re pretty happy about it. On top, we have a real chance of changing things in a very important field to many people

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

We focus on AI and we strongly believe it will change a lot of things in healthcare but also that we are not there yet. A few things need to change so that AI can be adopted and one of them is infrastructure.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

The community of like-minded people and the quality of the content.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Dig deeper.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

I don’t know. I guess I’m not sure others would be surprised by it:)