As part of a project at medical school, I wanted to understand why instructions for taking medicines that came with prescriptions were so inaccessible. I didn’t think it was the sole reason people struggle to take their medications, but I did think it was a significant contributor.
By the end of my research, I was shocked. I learned how poorly the healthcare system supported patients in learning about their medications. In my mind, something better could be and needed to be done.
With this problem at the front of my mind, I joined a university startup accelerator called Kickstart London with my Will (now co-founder at Suvera). Within ten weeks, we’d designed an application we hoped would provide easy access to helpful information about medication. Having done that, we soon found out that medication information wasn’t a priority to users.
Using the privilege handed to us as medical students, we spent months speaking to around 100 patients about our designs. But we wanted to know their own experiences, frustrations and hopes. With much attention, our conversations made it clear that access to quality and simple medication information was useful but not a pain.
A more pressing concern for patients was the burden of managing their conditions daily. Every patient had a version of similarly primitive ways of managing their condition. Fundamentally, there was no accessible, reliable or consistent support for people managing multiple medications/treatments.
We had to fix this.
Better management of long-term conditions is arguably one of the most important aspects of the healthcare system. These people make up over 70% of the costs and 80% of the resources for the healthcare system.
Soon enough, we recruited Ryzard as our third co-founder to lead design and experience at Suvera. We took on investment and began to build a team to work to rethink what condition management looks like within healthcare.
We began to imagine, what if? What if everyone was empowered to manage their condition wherever they were in the world by a super specialised and focused healthcare team powered and enabled by technology? In our world, why should managing our health conditions be so hard?
Our mission at Suvera is to keep people in good health wherever they are in the world. We are building the clinical team and technology to make this possible for as many people as possible.
