Klara: building the central nervous system of healthcare

NEW YORK - May 12, 2016 - PRLog -- Klara: building the central nervous system of healthcare

(NEW YORK, May 2016) - Klara was founded in Berlin, Germany, with the vision to improve a broken healthcare experience by directly connecting doctors and patients through software. Having started as a skin consultation app in 2013, Klara pivoted, moved to New York City in 2014, and evolved into a messaging based communication platform, connecting hundreds of medical practices with tens of thousands of patients, labs, pharmacies and referring doctors. Klara is changing the healthcare experience to care that focuses on the individuals operating in an ecosystem.

Klara originally launched a patient-facing app allowing people with skin diseases to easily get a diagnosis and treatment plan from board certified dermatologists within 24 hours. After launching in 10 different countries and handling 5000 submitted cases within the first months, the team realized two things: B2C distribution to patients is not scalable, and patients were not coming back as often as planned. Second, 98% of cases had successfully been answered and doctors were getting very excited about the potential of this direct mobile connection.

The team then decided to focus their product on the experience of increasing the efficiency of the healthcare experience through modern communication with doctors at the heart of the process.

"We see healthcare as a network and doctors are the most important nodes here. If we want to digitize healthcare, we have to focus on the doctor first, building something they and their medical teams love using with patients everyday. Only then we can bring the doctor-patient-relationship online and digitize the network successfully," Co-founder Simon Lorenz., who is leading Klara's growth efforts from its New York office.

Klara found asynchronous messaging to be the most convenient and effective format of communication for both patients and providers. Providers quickly went on to communicate not only with patients but also with other doctors, labs and pharmacies about patient related issues.

"Klara fundamentally improved workflows in our practice, centralizing all patient related communication into one place. We talk to patients about appointments, results, pre- and post-visit instructions, medication, billing and much more. We also talk to colleagues about referral patients, to labs about test results and biopsy reports, and to pharmacists about medication questions, pre-authorisations and prescriptions. Klara has made everything more efficient, nothing falls between the cracks and patients are truly appreciating this new kind of access to my practice team," says Dr. Mikhail, a New York based dermatologist who uses Klara in Manhattan practice.

We call our approach "rich messaging" where users can not only send messages but also richer content like embedded medical forms, questionnaires, payments, and much more - everything as easy as sending a text message. Our product is built to become the central medical messaging platform 3rd party services can integrate with and provide useful services to doctors and patients on top of Klara's messaging experience." says co-founder Simon Bolz, who is responsible for Klara's product.

"Essentially we are building the central nervous system of healthcare connecting all patients and doctors through secure medical messaging. First in the US, then all over the world. We are already seeing that our platform not only heavily increases efficiency but actually improves outcomes and quality of care by making health care a collaborative, transparent and accessible experience."

About Klara

Klara was founded in 2013 with the vision to change the broken healthcare experience by directly connecting doctors and patients through technology.

Klara's secure and HIPAA-compliant medical messaging platform allows practices to centralize all their medical communication in one simple and secure app.

Doctors and their teams can collaboratively treat and communicate with their patients, adding external providers and other medical partners (such as pharmacies, labs and insurance companies) to the conversation to streamline patient care.


Schedule a call with a Klara representative. (https://calendly.com/klara-usa/initial-phone-conversation...)

contact@klara.com