Marcus Richards
Helthik is a ML-based health assistant working with blood tests, symptoms and other body indicators.
It helps identify the correlations between human blood test values and risk of various diseases. It empowers users to interpret their laboratory tests instantly and guides on suitable next steps including, diagnosis, monitoring and treatment of a wide range of diseases, including the diseases that can stay asymptomatic for a long time.
Helthik: Diagnosis
Helthik allows users to get an instant provisional diagnosis on their blood results. It is ideal for people who have limited access to healthcare or cannot afford expensive and sometimes delayed clinician reviews. Helthik is also helpful for clinicians who want to improve their knowledge or want a quick diagnosis based on results in front of them
Helthik: Monitoring
Helthik allows users with chronic diseases to monitor their conditions better through early identification of deteriorating signs and helps avoid exacerbations leading to hospitalization. Helthik sends timely alerts for various tests and creates automated care plans to monitor disease progression.
Helthik: Health Checks and Well Being
Helthiks gives control to healthy individuals to review routine blood test results and identify any risks for future chronic disease incidence. This healthy thinking allows users to be more empowered and aware of how to manage their health better.
We strive to create an ecosystem solution for health care and disease diagnosis. Our approach will be able to cover different market needs, thereby saving health and lives, which will have a positive impact on the social and economic life of people and the state as a whole.
Tell us about yourself?
My motivation to work on Helthik is first and foremost personal. On the one hand it is about health, and on the other – is about helping people and personal examples of my relatives.
Since childhood, I have always had health issues and visited doctors many times. I saw the imperfection of the health care system on the one hand, but on the other – I was concerned about the lack of continuous and up-to-date knowledge about my own health. This has become the main motivation to help myself first of all.
At the same time, since childhood I have seen my grandmother and aunt engaged in healthcare. As medical specialists, I have witnessed them devoting completely to this field. They became role models for me of how to help and dedicate yourself in order to save people’s lives and health.
So besides my personal health, I realized that I want to help others, because there are a lot of people like me, people who want to know what is wrong with their health and get advice on what to do next in a short period of time. And at that very moment my motivation from personal became global. After all, there is nothing better than knowing that you can be useful and can help someone else.
Regarding my professional background, I have 4 years of experience as a Software Engineer and another 4 years as a Product Manager. For several years now I have been a co-founder and a product manager of a skin disease detection company and one of the founders of Helthik, where we together with Dr Ayub Khan (another founder of Helthik) work on disease risk detection based on blood tests and other body metrics.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
To test hypotheses faster and not be afraid to reach out to investors. Exercise more (during pandemic and remote work, it was hard to do, you know, right?) and read books (I am very inspired by your countryman Richard Branson, I hope to get to know him someday and meet him in person)
What problem does your business solve?
Lack of timely diagnosis of the health status, lack of a comprehensive approach in preliminary diagnosis based on interpretation and interrelationship of various blood tests parameters.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
As mentioned above, everything started with a personal inquiry, this is the main source of inspiration.
We solve the problem of the lack of timely health status diagnosis, based on different blood test parameters, as well as the availability of a diagnostic tool with a second opinion from general practitioners.
The tool will be applicable to a wide range of population ranging from healthy individuals wanting to know their risk for developing various diseases, to people living with chronic diseases for monitoring, to educating healthcare professionals/students.
What is your magic sauce?
Competitive advantages include our product vision and positioning with an ecosystem approach for different target audience, team’s expertise, a low-cost development center that saves resources and uses them more efficiently, access to potential large volume of data, and external expertise such as clinics and university systems
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
Within 5 years we are planning to enter the EU, UK, and Indian markets, as well as to start working on the US and middle eastern market. Right now we are doing diagnostics based on blood tests, but we plan to expand it to other body metrics. We will strive to become an ecosystem solution that covers the request from patients, doctors and medical companies
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
One of the key points is the renewal of the team, a painful but necessary step in the development of the startup, which we have also faced. We have however managed to compile an excellent team with a wide ranging experience from machine learning to clinical and marketing expertise.
The other challenge like any other start was funding. We have self funded the project till now and managed to get it to the MVP stage. However will now be actively looking for funding to take it to the next level.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
We did a demand test of our offering and received excellent feedback, high interest and requests for desired functionality.
At the moment we are starting a fund-raising process, so we are interested in communication with investors. Feel free to contact us via https://www.linkedin.com/in/artyomtrofimuk/
