While many services are global, from Amazon to Netflix, healthcare has not been able to break through national borders. AIP Clinic is the first large international digital hospital that can provide medical services EU wide, and even beyond Europe.
In an era of globalization and interconnectedness, the need for efficient cross-border healthcare solutions has become more pressing than ever. AIP Clinic is now aiming to create a Pan-European digital hospital that treats dermatological problems remotely and can be visited by any European citizen. The dermatology treatment is end to end, so it contains diagnosis and treatment. The EU-s Cross-Border Healthcare Directive now gives the right to all citizens to receive healthcare in another member state. That includes the mutual recognition of prescriptions, so the clinic is able to give full treatment with downloadable E-recipes.
Digital healthcare has emerged as a beacon of hope, promising to revolutionize the way medical services are delivered across national borders. This visionary initiative aims to transcend geographical limitations and foster a new era of healthcare collaboration, ensuring that citizens of Europe receive the best possible care, regardless of where they are.
Tenfold efficiency in dermatology diagnosis
AIP Clinic is originally an AI-developer company that took a turn, and now became a true digital healthcare provider. “During AI development, we realized that a streamlined digital infrastructure built around it is worth more than the AI module itself” says Mate Balazs Kovacs, the company's founder. So this US-European company has started developing comprehensive digital health infrastructure, and its end-to-end AI solutions are already operational in Europe.
The company's best-known and most commonly-used solution is AIPDerm – an AI-coordinated digital dermatology hospital. Thus far, AIPDerm has helped to treat more than 30K patients.
AIPDerm can provide professional dermatological diagnosis and treatment based on a photo submitted by a user to the digital hospital – an online platform. Human touch is still involved as doctors working with the platform are there to confirm the diagnosis and appoint treatment. However, AI successfully performs pre-diagnosis and administrative tasks, reducing manual managerial work to almost zero.
The AI behind AIPDerm's system has been trained on nearly 2.5M images and currently recognizes and successfully diagnoses over 700 skin conditions. “Our current data proves that 72% of dermatological problems can be fully treated through AIPDerm, reducing costly and slow in-person care. This frees up capacity for the remaining 28%, ensuring that urgent dermatology cases that require face-to-face care receive it on time,” Fazekas István AIP Clinic-s Founder says.
As the system streamlines and automates many medical tasks, doctors' efficiency increases tenfold – a dermatologist can review 40 cases per hour instead of the previous 4, making AIPDerm a great help in response to the current global doctor shortage. Not to mention the remote treatment possibilities that are enabled by increasing the availability of healthcare in medically underserved areas. Besides that, AIP Clinic' solution also significantly reduces appointment waiting time as there is no waiting list on the AIPDerm platform, and it's an always-on service.
Ambitions and a social mission
AIP Clinic's, the company's new cross border Digital Dermatology Clinic is designed to bridge geographical gaps and ensure that citizens receive specialized dermatological care, regardless of their location within the European Union. This pioneering initiative utilizes cutting-edge technology to offer virtual consultations, diagnosis, treatment recommendations, and follow-up care, all through a secure and user-friendly digital platform. Patients can begin the dermatological examination by uploading a picture of their skin condition, which is analyzed and pre-diagnosed by AI. A doctor then sets the final diagnosis, based on the pre-analysis of the AI and your image, and appoints treatment.
Such solutions improve access in many ways. The digital clinic currently sells full dermatological care for €25, below the market price, with 24-hour guaranteed results. This allows people in rural areas or who could not previously afford it to see a dermatologist. The company hopes that this will stimulate competition, which could reduce the cost of healthcare, which is nowadays available at unbelievable prices. While also reducing waiting lists for specialist care if the majority of patients can manage themselves online.
The EU market is based on the free movement of people, which to function properly needs their access to healthcare in their current state. This is often limited by language barriers. “I've seen a British engineer suffer at the Spanish dermatology clinic because he couldn't explain his symptoms. With AIP Clinic every 'expat' can go to a dermatologist in their own language.” Says Kovács Máté, the company's founder.
Besides developing powerful AI technology and wowing the digital health world with innovations, AIP Clinic serves a greater social mission – tackling the issue of access to healthcare. The company works with the Hungarian Maltese Charity Service to provide free teledermatology services to homeless people and cooperates with the Igazgyöngy Foundation to offer free digital health services in poor, isolated gypsy villages.
Asked about AIP Clinics plans, the company says it's aiming to launch an international charity program and is looking for partners to enable doctors to donate their expertise via AIPDerm to serve medically underserved regions worldwide.
The power of crisis-induced ideas
Even though AIP Labs is quite a fresh startup – founded in January of 2021 – its team holds immense expertise in AI, business management, and beyond.
The company's co-founders, Istvan Fazekas and Mate Kovacs, had known each other for a long time before founding AIP Labs. Witnessing the global healthcare emergency during the Covid-19 crisis led the business partners to the idea of building a digital health industry business to solve healthcare challenges.
Fazekas and Kovacs knew about an American-Canadian startup developing AI systems that were of their interest and could help bring their business idea to life. One Zoom conversation led to another, and the co-founders bought the systems, sending off the AIP Labs soon after.
More than just technology challenges
It's not really up for debate whether healthcare needs technological innovations.
Because it does.
Bringing AI-powered solutions to the table adds a new dimension of problem-solving capabilities regarding healthcare access and other related issues.
However, as AIP Clinic' team stresses, digital technologies alone cannot fix the issues that global healthcare systems face, such as shortage of staff and burnout, lack of system and tool interoperability, healthcare equity, treatment access, and more. Innovations can and will be of crucial importance in addressing the challenges. But digital healthcare tech should also be organized, keeping in mind the need for compatibility and interoperability of various solutions as well as the safety of patient data.
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