THE APP FROM ADELAIDE THAT'S WOWING THE US, BUT WHY CAN'T THEY CRACK AUSTRALIA?

WHEN Adelaide's Nick Stephenson heard the story of an untrained junior doctor working for 11 years in a New South Wales hospital he decided he wanted to overhaul the medical training system with a clever training app.

His training software, XapiApps, allows medical professionals to learn in the field, record progress, and have senior doctors monitor the on-the-ground learning of junior professionals.

The App has since been implemented in a number of hospitals in the US in the three years since its creation, with the help of just seven employees.

MedStar Health, which employs over 30,000 people in the Washington D.C. and Maryland area, uses the software to monitor and improve how staff respond to Code Blue emergencies.

The software is logged to an individual's record and aggregates response times on a floor-by-floor and facility-wide basis.

Stephenson has recently travelled to Orlando for the Learning Solutions 2017 Conference and Expo where the group received an award acknowledging their contributions to the medical community.

We spoke to Stephenson about the success of the app, breaking into the US market, and the joys of being based in Stirling, Adelaide.

Why is your app important for the medical profession?

We're in the area of making sure that learning is transferred to on-the-job application.

So as part of learning you need to verify that people are performing on the job and doing things properly and following those procedures within the requirements of particular hospital systems and that's what XapiApps is all about, that's why it is important.

It basically ensures that people are applying what they've learnt on the job and that they are verifying that so that, ultimately, we hope to reduce medical error and improve patient outcomes.
 

How hard was it to break into the US market?

Surprisingly easy!

Our technology is sort of the right place at the right time and pretty much by word of mouth and we've broken into that market.

What challenges did you encounter after breaking into the US? How different is the market to Australia's?

I would say the US market is way more sophisticated.

In a learning technology area, they're at least way ahead of where Australia is at, and actively looking for solutions like ours as opposed to reacting to them.

From a challenge point of view we've had to get our heads around the US health care system and the nuances of that.
 

Does the company have plans to enter into the Australian market?

We'd love to but for some reason the market doesn't seem to be ready for us, but I don't have the answer to that as to why.
 

So, do you think Australia might be lagging behind in technological innovations in the healthcare profession?

That's what I read on the situation; at least in the medical education from a technology perspective, they simply are well behind.
 

Do you have any insight as to why you think that might be?

With what we've seen from our US clients, they're actively going out and looking for start-ups like us to partner with to solve their problems.

They are much more proactive in identifying technologies that are going to aid them to deliver education and actively seeking us out and looking for partnership.
 

Have you received any positive feedback from the hospitals where XapiApps is implemented?

We actually just got back from Orlando last week where we were demoing the application of XapiApps in hospitals.

We won the award for Best Application of Technology in that area.

I think our clients think highly of us and certainly speak highly of the technology.
 

What sets your app apart from other technologies that might exist out there?

What happened was historically in the 2000s everyone wanted to start doing e-learning because it was the quicker and cheaper way of distributing learning content to workforces.

And there's a whole industry of learning management and stuff built up around it, but the elephant in the room with that kind of technology was no one ever looked at how that learning was being applied and taken an analytical approach to that.

So, we're in a unique place in that we've built a platform to verify that training has been applied on the job.

It sounds obvious now, but the idea of a supervising doctor being able to observe a junior doctor using our app and managing all the stuff around that, that just couldn't have been done on the US health care system due to 'bring your own device' policies etc., so we have this sort of point
in time where mobiles are available at these organisations, it makes sense for it to happen now.
 

Is being based in Adelaide important to you?

We really like it here.

From a liveability point of view, it's wonderful.

Our biggest challenge at the moment is spending all our time on planes and flying around but if you're going to be on the other side of the world, Adelaide's a great place to be.

Business News Australia