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Background and past experience

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?

From ReMin to Aidn

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.

What will make Aidn 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 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.

Background and past experience

I studied Computer Science at NTNU, and spent part of my studies in California. In the US I got to work with some of the most talented professors and professionals within security and I got completely hooked! I became a hacker, and I basically spent all my time hacking - day and night.

After returning to Norway I've continued to work various roles and jobs related to IT security, but I have also started and run several companies before joining Aidn.

Some initiatives have been super successful, others perhaps not so much. A common denominator for them though have been a solid foundation in modern technology (AI, machine learning etc) combined with talented people and an idea that we would be able to make a difference, offer something to the market that was way better than anything else out there.

My latest adventure before Aidn was a company called ReMin that I founded with Ingebjørn (who is also part of Aidn). ReMin was basically born in the early stages of the pandemic, as a way to solve an urgent need for the municipalities to organize and keep track of contact tracing, schedule vaccine bookings and the like. Within a few months we had a solution in production and now ReMin has over 200 municipalities using their products. It showed us what is possible to create when you have a clear mission, talented people and can develop in iterations in tight collaboration with the users.

Why Aidn?

It definitely wasn't my deep knowledge of the digital health sector. When I first got introduced to the project that today has become Aidn, I had no idea what a PLO system even was (an electronic communications protocol for municipal health care services). So I´ve spent a significant amount of time googling my way to an understanding of the domain itself. After being introduced to it though, and seeing first hand the state of it - the tools that our clinicians have to work with today, this has become a mission. I know we can deliver solutions that are so much better than what is currently out there!

What will make Aidn successful

Creating a great, collaborative system solution for clinicians is a challenge that is both hard and easy at the same time. The overall task and scope is hard - a completely new system that integrates information and opens up for collaborations across silos. Never been done before. But attacking it from a development standpoint is “easy” - you tackle it bit by bit until you nail it. Then - scale it.

We are in a unique position to make this happen with our setup. We have owners (Kernel) that truly believe in what we are looking to achieve and also how we will go about achieving it. This means we have all the freedom, trust, and funding necessary to go about this differently than many others operating within this domain today. We also have great insight into the e-health market both from our own employees, but also from other companies within Kernel.