Richard Cooke, founder of Hy-genie, is a pretty extraordinary entrepreneur. Retired from his position as the ‘Director of Infection Prevention & Control’ at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, Richard is revolutionising hand hygiene compliance across the healthcare system with his tech startup Hy-genie. We recently sat down with him to talk about his experiences of being a digital health startup founder.
So Richard tell me, what is Hy-genie?
Hy-genie is a monitoring system that detects the usage of hand hygiene stations in hospitals by clinical staff. Sadly hospital staff across the world are not good hand washers. The current baseline in the NHS is that about 50% of staff actually wash their hands appropriately, so Hy-genie monitors hand hygiene performance and encourages clinicians with personalised improvement goals and activity prompts to improve their habits. If we can improve handwashing, then we can majorly reduce healthcare-associated infections.
What have you learnt from being a Digital Health founder?
I’ve thought about this and very simply, it’s to avoid being a guinea pig.
I’m not from the startup world, I’m a medic and I’ve got into startups through Alder Hey children’s hospital in Liverpool and their partnership with Nova. Going into the project I didn’t have any experience about how to start a business, I’ve had to adapt and learn as the company has grown. I’m the furthest ahead as a medical founder from Alder Hey so this has meant breaking a lot of new ground. A large part of my ability to do this has been from the ongoing support and mentorship of Nova.
If you were to start all over again tomorrow, what would you do differently and why?
That’s an interesting question. So my position, I’m just under two years retired full time working as a Consultant Microbiologist and as Director of Infection Prevention Control (DIPC) at Alder Hey. If I were to start again, I’d probably like to be working part-time in the NHS in my clinical DIPC role and on Hy-genie so that I have as much clout as possible to influence people. I still have I think influence but of course the longer you are away from working full time in the NHS, those networks can start to fade.
Is it possible to do both? A lot of clinicians will say that they’re hesitant to pursue their startup ideas because they worry they’d struggle with time management?
They do, and that’s why I’m furthest ahead. But it works best when you can get that little mixture of both. Effectively this medical founder role worked alongside my Director position, half of my job was being a medical founder and the other was my clinical profession. The two influenced one another and gave the subject area progressive direction.
What would you suggest to clinicians and healthcare professionals thinking about starting a health tech startup?
Well, I would say as medics working in the NHS, we always think we’ve got the best possible idea before exploring it first, and so many of those ideas fail. One of the reasons that they fail is that we don’t always think about the user or whatever we’re trying to work on, putting the user at the centre of what we’re trying to achieve. What I’ve learnt through the process that Nova wanted to follow, problem first thinking, is to do multiple staff interviews across numerous hospitals to understand the staff’s perspective of what we’re trying to achieve and understand their fears, their concerns, positive/negative responses. So whatever you come up with as regards ‘the solution’, it’s a solution that you feel the confidence that will be adopted by NHS staff.
What has been your biggest failure throughout building your startup?
Failure sounds like a harsh word to use, but it’s important to remember its good in order to get your product development just right. Two years into Hy-genie, I’d like to have been a bit faster in terms of the technological developments and we’ve just had to be patient because something like this takes a lot of engineering and a lot of technological time to get it right. So once you’ve got the concept you can’t push any old product revision on the ward and get started, you have to be patient, and sometimes I’m not always the most patient person. So lack of patience is probably my biggest failure and not recognising that these things take time to get them right.
And what would you say is your biggest success to date?
In terms of my biggest success, is probably the backing that this project has had from Nova, Deepbridge Capital and NHS Institutions – that’s been an eye-opener. As we’ve gone around hospitals across North West and the West Midlands, by and large people are responding and understanding to what we’re trying to do. There’s always some people who just put their heads in the sand and don’t want to know, but the vast majority are welcoming. Most importantly, I’ve found what we’re trying to achieve here very fulfilling.
What’s your favourite thing about being a startup founder?
My favourite thing is working with the variety of people at Nova, who all work in completely different fields that I know nothing about and being able to engage with them. They all have their own specialisms and working with them, learning from them, it’s been great fun I really enjoy it.
If you would like to learn more about the work Richard and Hy-genie are doing visit their website – https://hygenie.io/
