'From concept to American market in record time – by working together'

Incision has become a worldwide success with its video-based education and training for operation room personnel. Now, alongside its trusted e-learning environment, Incision has launched a new digital assistant, developed in partnership with Levi9. This tool went from idea to market in record time. ‘We started in June 2021, and four months later, it was live,’ says Raimo van der Klein, Chief Product & Technology Officer. “And a year later, we were already running pilots in American hospitals.’

The mobile app is a strategically important expansion of the Amsterdam scale-up’s existing e-learning platform. ‘Now we can offer users direct support before and during the surgery,’ says Van der Klein, who stepped into his role as CP&TO two-and-a-half years ago. ‘This new digital product is crucial for the relationship with the end user.’

Incision Academy has been around for a while, offering e-learning accredited by international medical associations to train medical professionals in operation room-related activities. Now, the new Incision Assist tool gives those professionals direct access in the operation room to all relevant information: instructions, manuals, requirements, and the personal preferences of the performing surgeons – and all this for a wide range of procedures.

Co-creation

Incision Assist was developed in record time in a process of co-creation with Levi9: from concept to worldwide market launch in under one year. ‘The challenge was that there was relatively little we could reuse from our existing e-learning environment. And on top of that, with Assist, we’ll become part of the digital infrastructure of the hospital, so part of a strongly regulated IT environment. That requires enterprise-grade software.’

Incision was founded in 2014 by Dr Theo Wiggers and a group of investors. It is now a cutting-edge collective of driven doctors, software developers, marketers, and professionals working to grow the business from its home base in Amsterdam. ‘We believe in sharing surgery-related knowledge and skills and making them available to everyone,’ says Van der Klein.

The newly developed app will be a boon to students, personnel in training, and temporary staff in particular. ‘With Incision Assist, we can help operation room staff with any process and any procedure, in a uniform way. Its advantages are better preparation, reducing risks, improving team functioning and, ultimately, better medical outcomes. In combination with Incision Academy, this gives us a rock-solid proposition.’

Increasing impact

About the co-development process with Levi9, Van der Klein says, ‘They had also been involved in the development of the existing e-learning platform. From the moment that we decided to increase our impact in the digital domain, we worked out the best approach in a very effective dialogue. The goal was to, in a relatively short amount of time, put out a product that was at least viable, and that we could then scale up to the highest quality requirements fast and efficiently.’

Incision and Levi9 as partners went through a hyper-fast learning phase in a working process in which they used feedback from customers and users to add more and more features to the app. ‘At this point, we’re going forward with the expansion and upscaling of the platform based on modular technology.’

Van der Klein calls the joint development process a transformation within a scale-up. ‘And that in an industry that’s super-complex, that’s struggling to fill jobs right now, that’s heavily regulated, and that has extremely high standards for security. Because of these challenging and above all complex dynamics, we knew we needed a technology partner that could give us the right people, quality, and working methods. Without Levi9, we’d never have been able to do this as well or as fast.’

Source: itexecutive.nl