A new medical start-up in Romania has helped doctors from three countries collaborate to treat cancer patients in Ukraine after Russia’s brutal invasion.
The “Tumor Board” project was started by doctors from the US, Romania and Moldova to provide life-saving treatments to Ukrainians displaced by cancer.
The board, a collaboration between the Hell 21 Association and the Blue Heron Foundation, uses the platform provided by the Romanian start-up Medicaid to connect doctors, share medical files and discuss treatment plans, as well as allow patients to monitor their own progress.
Since April, pictures of cancer patients have been uploaded from Ukraine (with), the new picture from Moldova has been translated from Ukraine to Romanian/English and reports have been prepared for each patient.
Medicaid, which has so far raised 1.2 million euros in venture funding, says the web-based HIPAA-compliant platform hopes to be a “Miro for Health” type that allows healthcare professionals to collaborate on patient documents and records.
The problem Medicinal is solving sounds familiar. For example, to this day, patients walk into a $1 million MRI machine and – generally – walk out with an image of their knee or other body part on a CD. It’s just one example of how information can be siled and how patients can be locked into large, centralized systems. This means that medical professionals cannot easily collaborate with specialists outside their hospitals.
Established corporations selling these centralized systems include BoxDcom and Ambra Health, and startups include EnvoyAI and Collective Minds Radiology (which raised $6.7 million), among others.
Mircea Popa, the founder of Medicaid, started his journey in health care in 2011. Smart phones. SkinVision has reached 1.2 million downloads and raised a total of $15 million. Alexandru Artimon (CTO), co-founder of Medicay, previously co-founded the software company Atta Systems.
“One lesson we’ve learned recently about health care is that we desperately need flexibility,” Popa told me in an email. In the Timor-Board Project, we demonstrated that Medicaid could establish infrastructure in a matter of days to access expertise across 2 continents: the US and Canada to Romania and Moldavia – and it was done in less than ideal conditions.
He added: “Through the Tumor Board Project, we have been able to touch the lives of oncology patients who had no other option to seek treatment and we are truly proud to be a part of that.
So far, Medicaid says it has reached 29 paying clinics/hospitals, 2,434 doctor accounts and 1,400 patient accounts. It is also said that there is a strategic partnership with Microsoft and pharmaceutical companies.
Investors to date include D Moonshots, Cleverage Venture Capital, Roca X and Gapminder VC.
Meanwhile, the Timor Board project will continue. If four million Ukrainian immigrants are predicted to arrive in the coming months, there could be 13,000 to 16,000 new cancer patients per month in the countries bordering Ukraine.
