Startup Interview with Marco Egbring, CEO of epha.health

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

I am a doctor and clinical pharmacologist and have been coding since I was a child. Thanks to good medical care, I survived my childhood and have since been committed to excellent health care for others.

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

The service epha.health uses advanced AI and algorithms to predict the risk and exposure in complex therapies and calculates possible drug alternatives based on patient factors.

What is the origin story?

Starting in the University Hospital Zurich, we have been working for years to prevent medication errors and to protect patients from unnecessary harm. We always had the dream to create the perfect app to support doctors in such a way that errors no longer occur. With the new technical possibilities we can finally make it happen.

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

Everyone has different skills and together we are more than the sum of our skills. Together we have medical and pharmaceutical expertise, coding skills in backend and frontend, knowledge in data analytics and data science. Our joint decision is usually an iterative process, but better than any individual decision.

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?

Customers paying for the subscription of epha.health.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

Over the past four months since our launch, we have grown more than 50% per month in worldwide user web traffic. Our greatest success is that these users (doctors) started to pay for the subscription without being reimbursed from health insurances.

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

With data science, we can increasingly generate new knowledge and make better predictions. My fear is that the knowledge in the wrong hands will lead to people being deprived of their freedom. That dystopian future has already begun when the Tesla autopilot shuts down for a day when you don't have your hands on the steering wheel.

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

Coincidence. I have to see.

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

Wait for it. Good ideas take time to be recognised in society.

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

Software provider in healthcare are on a different level.