This is news that has sparked a lot of talk in the connected health sector. Start-up H4D, which marketed remote medical consultation kiosks, has secretly closed its doors after the Paris Commercial Court placed it under compulsory liquidation on September 26, 2024.
The company had a brief message in a post on LinkedIn: “Despite our best efforts to provide you with quality care service, our financial situation forces us to end the teleconsultation service as of the evening of 09/26/2024.“; thus referring its customers to a nearby doctor or to the emergency number. H4D was contacted several times and through different channels, and it never responded to our requests.
One of the pioneers of the remote consultation booth…
H4D was launched on the French market in 2008, at a time when remote consultation was very far from democratization. His idea: to sell “connected medical practices” in the form of cabins equipped with connected objects so that diagnosis can be performed remotely. It has developed a set of three pods: CS Clinic offering up to 14 connected tools, CS Smart with up to 7 connected tools, and CS Open – closest to the terminal – offering up to 7 tools.
When announced It collected donations worth 15 million euros In June 2020, it claimed to have installed more than sixty booths in major companies, local and regional authorities, serviced residences for the elderly as well as Red Cross centres. Dr. Frank Boudinot, the company’s former CEO, told us that nearly 20,000 people have used the device.
…released too early?
So many customers find themselves in unusable cabins. An unacceptable situation for Medadom, which also markets a teleconsultation kiosk service. for “Ensuring continuity of care“, decided to offer its services free of charge to the sanctioned municipalities before officially concluding the contract with them, Nathaniel Byrne, co-founder and chief technical officer (CTO) of Medadom, announced in Digital Factory.
“It is the economic model and its management that led to H4D’s loss“, analyzes a CTO who wants to show that the end of H4D is not synonymous with the end of remote consulting kiosks. “Successive administrations have not succeeded – and this is not necessarily a simple matter – in transforming the initial model into a permanent model“, he adds. He explains that H4D’s strategy was based on selling highly sophisticated cabins, equipped with many connected things, at a price of about “100,000 euros“. “It was a company that sold telemedicine equipment“, he sums up.
The turning point in the Covid-19 crisis
While the teleconsultation costs were not reimbursed by the health insurance, the H4D system was adhered to.”To a certain medical availability in exchange for a reward from an external structure consisting of doctors who pay patients for their actions“So,”The more teleconsultations there were, the more their losses would increase as they had to pay the doctors“, continues Nathaniel Byrne. However, once the costs of teleconsultation were paid for and its use was democratized with… Covid-19 pandemicThis model no longer works.
To avoid falling into this dilemma, Medadom wanted to offer “Teleconsultation devices are much cheaper” In the form of rent ranging from 200 euros per month for the terminal to 400 euros per month for the cabin. The amount of connected objects has also been reduced to keep only the necessary objects for medical consultation. About a hundred doctors are currently working for Medadom.
The company accounts for 15% of all teleconsultations performed each month, according to health insurance figures, the CTO confirms, which corresponds to more than 200,000 procedures. The majority of devices are installed in pharmacies (95%). 200 communities are now equipped. The medium is “Profitable and growing“, points out Nathaniel Byrne.
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