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When serial entrepreneur Dean McEvoy looks for new investment opportunities he searches for someone who is in love with solving a problem. And that is what he found with Tyde creator Romain Bonjean.

French-born Bonjean and his co-founders Shamus Cooper and Sudeep Gohil (both are Tyde advisers) launched the health business two years ago. Tyde is the first consumer-focused app for the federal government's My Health Record platform that is being rolled out by the Australian Digital Health Agency.

It's a single point to access and manage records, appointments and prescriptions that has real-time treatment adherence data, and that allows multiple users to interact in real time. Users can join the entire family's health records together.

"We got a great team in health informatics," says the 40-year-old Bonjean. "It is quite a complex activity to get the right architecture, connect properly, and the security and safety and privacy measures put in place are second to none. It makes banking and stock broking look like child's play next to it.

"Fundamentally we are a consent engine. We have the right to store a copy of your record and we are the only ones in the market to have this level 4 certification."

Tyde started with seed capital of just $800,000 and now has raised an additional $3 million from investors such as McEvoy, who first met Bonjean via start-up accelerator Startmate. Other investors include Christopher Hill from Chicago Ventures, who sold his Spotlite business to UnitedHealth Group for an estimated $US400 million. Alan Jones of KPMG's High Growth Ventures (also adviser/mentor for start-up incubator BlueChilli) and several Melbourne-based family offices have put in money too.

McEvoy – best known for selling Australia's first group buying site Spreets.com to Yahoo!7 in an estimated $40 million deal – is also chief of industry technology group TechSydney. He says companies like Tyde, with a major focus on consent by the user, will become even more important given the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica story that this week revealed even more users, 87 million, were compromised in the scandal enveloping the social media giant.

Future of medicine

"Romain is one of the most resilient founders I've seen," McEvoy says. "I believe people fall in love with problems. I could see that he was so passionate about health and I could see he was really passionate about wanting to help people. That's how I look for investments, I Iook for people who fall in love with a problem because they will keep working until they find a solution.

"What's going on right now with Facebook is going to drive a greater demand for companies like Tyde. Your health data is so private and so important.

"That important data layer between you and all future possible healthcare services that others are working on – being able to plug your data in and control who has use of it for a certain time or for whatever purpose – is really important for the future of medicine, and to optimise your own health."

In 2017 the federal government committed $374 million to expand the world's first national medical record system open to third-party developers. So far about 6 million Australians have My Health Record, with the entire 24 million-odd population poised to move digital by year end, unless they opt out later this year. Tyde is one of four companies connected to My Health Record (Telstra Health, Chamonix and HealthEngine are also connected)

Bonjean agrees with recent comments by Maile Carnegie, the head of digital banking at ANZ, that Medicare has a high-quality data set that any other government in the world would be salivating over, putting Australia at a strategic advantage to create a new niche for the local technology industry.

However, he doesn't believe Australia should just open this data pool up widely to third-party developers.

"Where I disagree is the idea where you could just open the tap and get an algorithm roaming across it all without consent," he says. "The fundamental act of giving consent is really important. There are a lot of people who want to use health data for secondary use. You never know what someone might want to do with this private information. I think everyone can see that from what has happened with Facebook."

Hard-won success

Bonjean studied architecture at University of Sydney, but growing up in a family of doctors and surgeons obviously impacted his interest in health space. He previously founded Lumigenix, a consumer genomic testing business (similar to 23andMe where he later worked), which went bust in 2013.

While he had some setbacks, he also had some wins, like his investment in photo search and edit software app company Lumific acquired by GoPro. He also co-founded iVox, Australia's first wholesale VoIP provider, which merged with Telcoinabox during its IPO in 2013.

Following the raising, Tyde is valued at about $10 million. Bonjean expects to be profitable within two years. Tyde is free for the consumer but earns revenue by charging healthcare providers and payers a fee per use. As a patient goes into coordinated care such as for heart failure treatment, Tyde charges providers to coordinate their care over the platform, ensuring the right data is presented at the right time to the right clinician. Currently it is charging about $30 a month per user, but plans on implementing a tiered system.

As nations look to digitise their health systems, Bonjean sees big opportunity to partner in places like Singapore, South America and the UK.

"I don't want to be over ambitious, but in five years we will be a publicly listed company and will have gone overseas once or twice," he says. "Slow and steady wins the race. We are setting up for a long game. We want to be a leading health-tech innovator."

Chris Hill said he personally invested due to Bonjean's bold vision for a product that helps improve lives.

"It is amazing how difficult it is for individuals to get a complete picture of one's own health info and stats," he says. "Tyde gives individuals control and transparency when it comes to their own health as well as the ability to share with their family or friends involved with coordinating their care. So cool. And the Australian government's EMR [electronic medical records] provides the perfect launch pad."

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Autor(en)/Author(s): Carrie LaFrenz

Quelle/Source: The Australian Financial Review, 06.04.2018

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