Munich Startup: Who are you and what do you do? Please introduce yourselves!
Tobias Bobinger, Innomeda: We are the people behind Innomeda GmbH and run the healthcare platform Klinikradar.de, which we are currently restructuring from a directory exclusively for finding hospitals into a holistic healthcare portal. Because I’m passionate about the vision, I just recently joined the core team, which includes Alex (37, business, customer service), Alice (37, web development) and Marco (37, UX and online marketing). I’m Tobias, 38, a neurology specialist and I bring along my wealth of experience from many years of clinical work to solve a major problem in healthcare.
Munich Startup: What problem does your startup solve?
Tobias Bobinger, Innomeda: The healthcare landscape is characterized by many different service providers and various therapeutic approaches. Patients often have a difficult time identifying their treatment options and selecting the options that suit them best. As a whole, the quality of the various offers in the healthcare landscape is very difficult to gauge, depends on many different factors and is quite often assessed based on subjective parameters. That is where we come in and give patients an independent guide to support them during their recovery.
Objective quality data instead of subjective opinions
Munich Startup: But that’s nothing out of the box!
Tobias Bobinger, Innomeda: That’s true when it comes to individual treatment options. There are doctor directories, directories exclusively for hospitals, platforms for physical therapy services or websites for apps or telemedicine offers. On Klinikradar.de, we’re currently incorporating all treatment options for specific illnesses, which allows us to offer a holistic healthcare platform. We also draw on objective quality data instead of subjective reviews from medical laypersons.
Munich Startup: What have been your three biggest challenges so far?
Tobias Bobinger, Innomeda: We have definitely encountered a few along the way. The healthcare industry as a whole is still far from being digitally oriented, which means new models are often rejected at first. It often took a long time to reach the right person to talk to. We were fortunate enough to find some innovative supporters recently.
Like many other founders, we tested and validated different healthcare business models in the beginning. The key challenge was working out our current focus on a holistic healthcare website and to now technically implement it. We’re also trying to closely involve visitors in product development.
And as was obviously the case for many other startups, the corona crisis was a major challenge for us because all of the players in the healthcare industry were busy dealing with damage control and innovations, so (understandably) we had to wait at the back of the line.
Innomeda fared well in the corona crisis
Munich Startup: How is business going?
Tobias Bobinger, Innomeda: Our website has been very well received by our visitors. Since last year, we’ve been the biggest private hospital directory in Germany. The number of visitors and the amount of visitor interaction are growing continuously. During the acute phase of the corona pandemic, the number of visitors did decrease significantly by up to 65 percent, as was to be expected, because elective hospital procedures were initially avoided and then simply not possible for a period of time. But that has completely balanced out in the past few weeks. We were also able to renew partnerships with hospitals, because they were so pleased with the first contract period, and also won over new partners.
Munich Startup: What do you think about Munich as a startup location?
Tobias Bobinger, Innomeda: The startup scene in Munich has developed significantly in recent years and can really hold its own now. I think it has become an excellent breeding ground for new ideas. And that was the case for us as well: We met at Werk1.
Munich Startup: Get up early in the morning or pull all-nighters?
Tobias Bobinger, Innomeda: Because I’m a new dad, often both, unfortunately!