Health technology company SynPlan addresses some of the most important challenges facing the healthcare system. They use artificial intelligence to turn historical data into predictive information about future sickness absence and budgets in the health care services.
At the beginning of February, the Norwegian Health Personnel Commission presented its report, which outlined a serious future scenario for the healthcare system and the welfare state. The commission concluded that we must do more with fewer resources. We have to find ourselves treating more patients per employee in the healthcare system.
Hai Thanh Nguyen is an associate professor at NTNU and has more than 12 years’ experience with artificial intelligence and machine learning systems. He is also the founder of SynPlan, which helps municipalities build predictive systems for managing capacity in the municipalities’ health services.
SynPlan has been used by Trondheim municipality since 2022. Oslo municipality has recently finished a pilot project with the SynPlan solution with great result as well and they have now decided to move further to the implementation phase.
– What we saw was that our solution brings great opportunities for municipalities, hospitals to significantly reduce the agency hires and overtime, thus improving the working conditions for employees and increasing the quality of healthcare services. Our customers have saved millions with our solution, says Nguyen.
Important to build network
Several other municipalities and hospitals have shown interest in SynPlan’s product. At the same time, Nguyen sees some challenges ahead.
– Everyone agrees that the problem of excessive use of temporary workers must be fixed, but implementing new solutions and thus also new ways of working, takes time. That’s why we work along several axes to get attention for our solution, says Nguyen.
He says that the company had a good dialogue with both the Norwegian Nurses’ Association and the trade union Fagforbundet . The company was approached by representatives of Parliament for a presentation and the feedback after the meeting was very positive. Nguyen continues:
– The support from Norway Health Tech has been important. In 2020, we were invited to a webinar organized by Norway Health Tech, where we met 150 representatives of Norwegian municipalities. It was important to build networks and create stronger ties with municipalities.
Looking for investors
Having received good evidence that their solution works well in municipalities, SynPlan will in future develop a solution for hospitals. And to finance the development and scale up the business, they are now looking for investors.
– We already have many exciting dialogues. Through a meeting at the British embassy last year, which Norway Health Tech facilitated, we got a collaboration with the public health system NHS in Great Britain. This dialogue is still in an initial phase, but we have ambitions to scale and are optimistic about succeeding in the hospital sector, Nguyen concludes.