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After three months of planning, we officially kicked off the One HealthTech Stockholm hub (OHT Stockholm) with our launch event on February 20th. We heard from four amazing
speakers about their journey in health-tech, and the rewards and challenges they have faced.
Who we are and how we got here
My name is Jenney, and I work as a product designer at KRY on our clinician-facing product; my day-to-day role is to try and understand our clinicians' pain points of both working in healthcare and with KRY, to see how we can improve their experience.
In October 2019, I had a chanced conversation with Maxine, who is one of the co-founders of the global One HealthTech (OHT) organization, about the possibility of starting a new hub in Stockholm. I very quickly lured my colleague Hedda Selder (service designer at KRY) into the scheme. We discussed what we wanted to build and started to mould out our first event together.
The process of building a community
Even though neither of us had any previous community-building experience, we discovered it was similar to the design process we work with at KRY (the triple diamond process).
We gathered our assumptions about what this community should be and conducted user interviews (aka., a lot of fikas ☕️) with different people in healthcare and health-tech companies.
Some of the people we talked to include Johanna from H2 Health Hub, Ellen from Natural Cycles, Sofia from Elsa Science, and Magda from KRY. From those conversations, we were able to generate lots of ideas and create the skeleton for our launch event.
Planning the launch
We wanted to keep the topic as broad as possible for our launch event, in the hopes that it would attract more people. And from our own experiences of working in the industry, we thought it would be interesting to hear if there were common frustrations and rewards between different roles and different companies.
Deciding our speaker lineup was the hardest part of this process. There were so many people with interesting stories, and we wanted to hear them all! It was like walking into an ice cream shop with all the flavours in the world 🤤, and you can only have one (or in our case four).
Since both Hedda and myself both worked in a health-tech company, securing a venue turned out to be easier than we expected. KRY was also very eager to sponsor this initiative and resonated strongly with our community mission.
Advertising the event proved to be another challenging task. We had a slow start, advertising by word of mouth and through our social media; somewhere in-between, with help from our sponsor KRY, we managed to skyrocket in registration 😱!
The big night
The number one lesson learned from the night was: always expect tech problems. We had some trouble with setting up our Youtube live stream and the sound quality, but the evening proved to be very successful despite this hiccup!
Christine Nguy, CEO and co-founder of Brightmed, discussed her startup journey and the hurdles she came across in trying to launch a digital tool to support self-medication.
"Every day feels like you are wading through Mordor, trying to navigate the unknown."
Katarzyna Hess-Wiktor, CEO and co-founder of Minnity, shared with us the personal story of witnessing the impact of dementia at a young age, and how that inspired her entrepreneurial journey to provide dignity for patients.
Alexandra Lindfors, CEO of Ocean, Talked about the importance and the power of design to influence healthcare.
"You are never more human than in healthcare; design helps involve everyone and deal with the complexity of health."
Nasim Bergman Farrokhnia, director of research and education at KRY, spoke about the need to innovate and remodel healthcare, to not only provide a better experience for patients but also to empower healthcare professionals.
At the panel discussion, we had some great questions from the audience: we talked about how regulations can be frustrating, given healthcare is traditionally a very cautious industry. We acknowledged we need to do more with less to demonstrate the value of innovation. And that we need to keep having the conversation around diversity, and overcome our own biases.
What next?
We have already started planning our next events, and we hope to share more details soon 🥰. We are also collaborating with people to organize workshops to help people scale up. Some of the skills we are already working on include design thinking, user research, machine learning, data analysis.
But we also need your help: what do you feel is currently missing? What do you want us to do? You can share your ideas with us in this form: OHT Stockholm community board.
Jenney Shi
OHT Stockholm co-curator