SurgiQ is a SIT community company specialized in high-tech solutions in the medical field. We had a conversation with one of the founders and administrator of the startup, Ivan Porro. He is extremely busy right now, speaking to us directly from London, where he is now working.
SIT: Hi, introduce yourself, what is SurgiQ?
Ivan Porro: Hi, I am Ivan Porro one of the founders of SurgiQ and the administrator. SurgiQ tries to help hospitals make the best decision, as quickly as possible. What we do is we collect the data already in the hospital, put it in one container and serve it “on a silver platter.” In this way, the user no longer has to go to different systems to figure out which patients, for example, need surgery the following week; collecting a request for surgery seems trivial, but at the hospital it can take half an hour to be collected, whereas with us it happens in real time.
SIT: Do you look for innovative ways to help hospitals by implementing your solutions?
Ivan Porro: We often help the hospital implement specific solutions. For example: a public hospital in Genova wanted to find the best way to do patient discharge. The problem was the following: it costs a lot to keep a patient in the hospital, so hospitals tend to “discharge” the patient as soon as possible. This is not the best thing, either for the patient or for the hospital, because if you send the patient home too early and he does not have a chance to be treated at home properly, it is easy for him to come back to the hospital later because he comes to the emergency room, and that is a cost as well as a problem for the patient.
Galliera Hospital has implemented this new model which is called a nurse-led ward, where they take patients and discharge them from the hospital to this specific ward. It’s a trait-d’union between intermediate hospitalization, where the patient is managed by nurses, at a lower cost, and care at home: the patient is educated on how to then care at home, how to keep themselves under control, after which they are released. In this way they have seen that there is a big savings, because they have reduced the number of patients who have to go back to the hospital, and the management costs are lower.
SIT: Can you elaborate on how you create social and/or environmental impact?
Ivan Porro: What we do has a direct impact on hospitals, but we believe there is a strong impact on the patient and on the patient’s family. The fact that you can plan a very clear schedule of activities allows the patient’s parents to manage their time off work, or the child of an elderly person can better organize themselves to care for the patient, so where you can avoid phenomena like too long waits, or last-minute cancellations, or arriving and you can’t find a bed, that has a very strong impact.
SIT: What are your future prospects?
Ivan Porro: We are currently working a lot in England, I’m calling you from London, where we have been accepted by a start-up accelerator program. We have several collaborations in London, we have a project in a London hospital and another one more to the north. Our ambition is to in fact develop the market here in England to have an international enterprise character. We will have to export what we have done in Italy, last year we did 40,000 patients. We would like to export that value, but let people work in Italy.
