Ingebjørn, can you please tell us a bit about your experience prior to joining Aidn?

Well I have been a doctor now with a general practice for about 10 years. I still practice, in the sense that I am the chief physician for Hadsel municipality. I have been tormented with poor IT tools my entire work life. It is not unique to me, it is a global problem for the health care sector. I`ve tried to tackle it many times, but always fallen short because there are too many people involved to make changes happen.

When the pandemic hit, I quickly saw that I would need to keep an overview of contact tracing, but I had no software to help. So I asked a friend if he could help me build some macros in Excel to do the job. Coincidence would have it that the challenge was presented to the company where Morten (current CEO of Aidn) worked - and his response: Excel? Surely there must be a better way to solve it!

And within a few months, we had co-created ReMin and were serving roughly 200 municipalities with contact tracing, booking of vaccines and the like. The core question for anything we put into production was basically - is it better than Excel?

So from ReMin to Aidn, can you give us some details on how you came to be part of this journey?

ReMIn eventually got bought by Kernel. The management of Kernel asked the question - what do you think should be the next big bet? I answered the health care sector in the municipalities.

I believe that there is nowhere else regarding health care, where the gap between the problem needing solving and the solutions available, is greater. The population is aging and it is expensive to treat patients in hospitals. The municipalities will need to take a greater share of the care responsibility and this will only increase in the years to come. It is critical for Norway that we are able to solve this challenge. The healthcare sector has been underserved for so long on the IT tool side, there is massive potential for vast improvements.

Can you tell us a bit more about what it is that you think will make us successful?

The problem for many companies within ehealth, is that the people developing the solutions are too detached from the people that end up using it. You need to walk in the shoes of the clinicians to truly understand. In Aidn we are co-creating a solution with the clinicians. As a doctor myself, I know all too well the problems and challenges we face performing our work.

The way Aidn is set up, like a true start-up company, is unique. I do not believe we would be able to develop a solution so different, so groundbreaking, had we tried to do it within an existing solution. But unlike many start-ups ,we have solid backing from Kernel, both in terms of funding and in experience and competence within the domain, and that provides us with an advantage. I also believe our timing is just right. We are offering a solution to a problem that cannot be ignored any longer.

Lastly, but perhaps most importantly - it is the people that make up Aidn that will make us successful. The quality of competence and knowledge we have been able to attract so far is overwhelming!

Why should others want to join us?

Every company and organization needs developers and product people. But if I was going to allow myself to be a bit cocky - I doubt there are many places one could work that had a more important problem to solve!

Healthcare is where most of your tax money is spent. This is a service all of us, and all our loved ones, will need at one or several points in our lives. This is the sector where we need to recruit the most people in order to tackle the aging population. It needs to be an attractive profession that allows clinicians to focus on the core of patient care. If we can reduce the administrative time spent by clinicians by even 10% - the compiled effect will be enormous! We are not just developing another admin system. We are challenging what has been conceived as possible and we are aiming to create the WOW feeling for every healthcare professional that is using our system.