Fixing the business of healthcare

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Some clinics in the UAE are so overwhelmed by patient enquiries that they have switch their phones off for the morning. Meanwhile, nurses are printing referrals, scanning them and manually entering the same information into another system.

That’s the problem HealthStay’s Seán Conaty and Ruairí Tubrid are trying to solve.

We get into their shift from a consumer medical tourism business to software for hospitals and clinics, what they learned from an early pilot with King’s College Hospital, and why adding an AI chatbot doesn’t help much if the team receiving its enquiries is still working off spreadsheets and personal phones.

Seán and Ruairí explain how the regional conflict stalled enterprise contracts and disrupted their hosting, why they stopped taking salaries, and how they rebuilt their infrastructure while raising $1 million over the summer, with existing investors and Enterprise Ireland backing the business.

We also discuss selling into an industry some VCs consider too slow, why they price around patient journeys rather than seats or tokens, and what it takes to turn a promising hospital pilot into a paying customer.

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