Smart Health from Winterthur - A visit to heyPatient AG

At the beginning of February, House of Winterthur visited the company heyPatient together with Mayor Michael Künzle. The founding couple, Regula and Matthias Spühler, warmly welcomed Roger Graber, Antonietta Lomoro and Michael Künzle to their office in Seen. The young tech company makes it easier for hospitals and soon also doctors' practices to digitize patient-oriented processes. This can significantly reduce costs in the healthcare sector.

"It all started when our youngest was hospitalized," says Regula Spühler. "We quickly realized how tedious it was to organize the stay due to missing data, countless forms and a lack of written information." This experience gave rise to the Spühlers' idea of developing an app that would put everything important at your fingertips. In 2019, the idea became reality - the solution was created and the company was founded. The heyPatient app has been available free of charge in the stores since January 2020.

Saving a billion francs
Since then, the small Winterthur-based smart health start-up has been able to convince various clinics and hospitals of the benefits of its app, including Baden Cantonal Hospital. Following a pilot phase in the maternity ward, the app is now being rolled out throughout the hospital and at other locations. This will not only make hospital stays easier for patients, it will also save the hospital itself a lot of time and money. This is particularly impressive when you look at how much less it costs to make appointments via the app. "It has been shown that the costs per individual appointment at Baden Cantonal Hospital have been reduced from 35 to five francs when appointments are organized via the app instead of on paper," says Matthias Spühler. Calculated across all hospitals in Switzerland, this could save one billion Swiss francs per year just on appointments.

From left to right: Regula and Matthias Spühler, Michael Künzle, Antonietta Lomoro, Roger Graber, Silvan Bergmann

The heyPatient app can also be used, for example, to find out about new treatment methods that affect you.

Versatile and secure
But the app can do much more. In addition to the dossier with documents and health insurance cards, early access to the electronic patient dossier (EPD) and appointment synchronization in the mobile calendar, it is also possible to receive news from the respective healthcare provider. For example, app users can find out about new treatment methods that affect them. The "heyFamily" extension can also be used to organize hospital and doctor visits for family members. All of this works in the app in 16 languages. In view of so much sensitive data, the question of data security quickly arises, says Regula Spühler. "We ensure user identification with the Swiss ID, the data is stored in Switzerland and the transmission is encrypted," says Spühler.

Satisfied with Winterthur
The Winterthur-born start-up founders are satisfied with Winterthur as a location. They particularly like the way the city has managed to turn vacant industrial areas into lively and creative districts. In the age of working from home, this is a not insignificant locational advantage, says Spühler. A lot has also happened in terms of start-ups in recent years: "We are thinking here of Startup Night and Digital Winterthur, where we are actively involved ourselves."

Text: Silvan Bergmann