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Helping physicians using POSOS

3 min read First on Medium

Contents
  1. The technology
  2. Business Model
  3. Fundraising and support
  4. Market
  5. Competitors

View from POSOS website

In 2020, 49% of physicians described having symptoms of burnout. With more and more patients and yet fewer doctors, the workload is heavy and the work long. It, therefore, seems necessary to find solutions to simplify the less complex tasks.

This is why Benjamin Gelié (engineer), Emmanuel Bilbault (pharmacist and former ESSEC student), and Pierre Dembiermont (pharmacist) created, in March 2018, POSOS, a therapeutic decision support solution allowing the doctor to save time on the choice of drugs to prescribe. The Amiens-based startup currently has about 20 employees composed of pharmacists and engineers.

The technology

In France, “nearly 10,000 deaths are attributed to the misuse of drugs” each year. Yet it is hard to imagine doctors knowingly making bad recommendations. The reason seems much less horrible: there are too many drugs and the medical staff is overloaded. Doctors no longer have the time to take the time and find themselves potentially recommending outdated or less suitable drugs than others.

To address this issue, POSOS offers a portable application that assists doctors in choosing the right prescription. Based on a database created from an aggregate of dozens of sources (such as the HAS — Haute Autorité de Santé, the CRAT — Centre de Référence sur les Agents Tératogènes — or the European Medicines Agency), POSOS acts as a platform allowing the doctor to compare drugs or filter certain drugs according to side effects.

View of Posos’ App from Posos’ website

POSOS uses AI and Python to capitalize on its large database and enable an intelligent analysis of multiple drugs. It thus offers many features including:

  • Customization for each patient, to filter allergies or intolerances;
  • Cross-referencing of information, to compare multiple drugs and their side effects;
  • Identification of relevant extracts allows the physician to quickly find the necessary information.
  • Natural Language Query, allowing the physician to save time with a simple and uncluttered interface;
  • Query suggestions, to quickly target the right drug;

Business Model

Currently, POSOS is 100% free for healthcare professionals and students. A premium version (allowing Posos to be financed through fundraising) is sold to hospitals and offers advanced functionalities such as the connection to the computerized patient record (CPR).

POSOS currently has over 35,000 users, nearly half of whom installed the tool via a recommendation from a colleague.

Fundraising and support

In 2019, POSOS raises its first round of funding of €2 million from the family office Melusine, as well as from a network of private investors gathered on the Anaxago platform. The same year, the startup joined Microsoft’s AI Factory program at Station F.

Market

In 2020, the global market for therapeutic decision support tools was estimated at 1.2 billion dollars. It is expected to reach $1.8 billion by 2025, with a growth rate of 9.1% over 5 years.

Competitors

POSOS is positioned on a very specific branch of Healthtech. It could be classified as a SADM (medical decision support system) or LAP (prescription assistance software). Today, there are 80 LAP software programs certified by the HAS.

Apart from Synapse Medicine and HealthForPeople, we have not found many startups or companies in direct competition with POSOS (apart from the software publishers mentioned above) but here is a selection of healthcare startups that are close to it:

You can find Posos on Medium !

Posos Créée en 2018, Posos s’est donné comme mission de rendre interrogeable toute la connaissance médicale pour permettre… medium.com

The business part of this article was written by Emilie Nouacer, the tech part by Mathieu Van de catsije.