Every week we feature a new startup at Fundsup that forces a radical breakthrough. This time we chat with Jochen Bretschneider, Co-founder & CEO of Med Learn eXperience.
Read the Dutch version on Emerce.
Jochen, what exactly are you doing?
As an ENT-surgeon and medical teacher, I see daily how medical students struggle to make the medical practice’s first steps. It is quite challenging for them to apply theoretical knowledge from the first medical years to their complex work with their primary patients. Mobile devices offer many new options to help by having information always and anywhere available.
That’s why we founded MLX, which stands for Med | Learn | eXperience. We published 125+ titles in collaboration with the VU University Medical Center in 2018. These titles cover more than 1,200 medical conditions and 10.000 stunning visuals and interactivity. They are created to support the students to study anywhere during their last 3 years studying Medicine. Many positive responses followed after publishing these titles. Meanwhile, 5 Dutch universities started using our titles for their own medical education.
“Our content supports medical students’ struggle to find the right information at the right time.”
Where do you see its main application?
Textbooks are the backbone of medical education. Unfortunately, they have limitations in user experience and the setting in which they can be used. Furthermore, the knowledge gained from textbooks during the first years needs to be applied while working. Our content supports students’ struggle to find the right information at the right time. Also, this content is better suitable for clinical practice in both high- and low resource settings.
At the same time, our comprehensive digital collection is also the framework for individual medical teachers to realize what students really need to know. A teaching institution that provides this collection to students and teachers has created a reliable, efficient, and engaging medical education framework.
What is the impact of your business?
The WHO stated a shortage of more than 12 million healthcare providers in 2035, worldwide. The traditional teaching concept of using textbooks will not solve that problem at all. Therefore, there is a growing demand for digital teaching content, which is interactive, compact, easily updated, and expandable. Since we started to develop the concept for the Dutch market, we have been building curriculum-wide international networks. We have also already created international project-based digital learning content for both low and middle-income countries and developed countries.
The working conditions for healthcare professionals are different depending on the local healthcare circumstances. However, the core knowledge and the core skills for being a doctor or a nurse are comparable worldwide. MLX’s founders are rooted in the medical world – all four co-founders are medical doctors. Our company’s policy of giving back to society helps us to expand our market.
Where do you stand right now?
We started as a small team, to create stunning educational content together with our professional medical network to support medical learning and teaching. Over the last years, we managed to gain traction amongst higher medical undergraduate education. We also collaborate with national and international institutions for postgraduate training. We develop content for different customers and are expanding our network continually. We focus now on business development and building the platform for our medical education assets to scale up.
“ … gaining the first institutional and commercial customers was possible without any investment which clearly demonstrates our idea’s market demand (…).”
When are you planning to go to the market?
We are already on the market. The last year and the COVID-19 challenges made institutions realize that there is a tremendous demand for validated digital content in higher medical education, as preparation for face-to-face sessions or remote ones. While writing this, our collaboration with 5 Dutch medical universities is online at https://studeergeneeskunde.nl.
Our next steps are:
- Building an English 1500 diagnoses AI integrated database (text, visuals, interactive elements),
- Expanding the company with teams for new content creation, graphic design, and digital interactivity,
- Expanding customer base providing tailor-made education to their needs,
- Further developing the concept of interactive medical learning content,
- Collaboration with NGOs, institutional and commercial partners for distribution.
Who has invested in you and what kind of investors are you looking for?
Until now, we are bootstrapping; building our business, gaining the first institutional and commercial customers were possible without any investment. It clearly demonstrates our idea’s market demand and made it possible to improve our products and workflow.
Now, we are looking for investors to help us expand and further develop our business case.
What would be the ideal investor match?
We are looking for investors who are curious to experience how technology changes the way we learn and we teach and who share our belief, that medical education needs to change to solve the healthcare problems we have worldwide. Ideally, the investors bring business knowledge we need as a start-up to scale up and to disrupt the old model of information sharing in medical education.
Best of luck with everything!
Thanks, check out our pitch deck in the Fundsup app: https://api.fundsup.co/go/brNk3rcJP