We introduce you all deeper to our CLS member Alteri Care with co-founder and CTO Patrik Almö. Alteri Care specialices in IT solutions for healthcare providers who want to offer digital healthcare, or as it is called in Portugal, Telemedicina.
Partly thanks to Patrik and his early connections to Portugal, the Swedish company now also works with a team located in Seixal. Read about this and more from our interview with Patrik below.
How are you today, Patrik?
Well, we finally got some sun here today in Malmö, Sweden so I am happy!
You are the co-founder and CTO of Alteri Care. Please start by telling us how you started the company and what it is that you do.
Back in 2013, we first started working with companies who requested online healthcare services. Both me and Michael, CEO and co-founder, have backgrounds within IT and some prior experience from working on projects within public sector and medicine and health. In 2019, we decided to develop a platform that would work for all types of healthcare services with their individual care flows, hence Alteri Care was born.
Our product as such is a digital platform which we offer to various healthcare providers. For example, we work with some municipalities in Sweden on facilitating digital care (or telemedicina as it is called in Portugal) through our platform. Today our platform works for everything between IVF treatment to addiction treatment to primary healthcare.
We also work with a wide range of customers in different countries. They can all use our platform but naturally every care-provider has their own configuration which is adapted to their care-flows. What is unanimously equally important for us to deliver is the certification of integrity and security in our IT solutions. Within our industry one might say it is of unique interest to keep a high profile regarding safe communication.
In what countries do you operate in today?
As of now we have customers in Sweden, Portugal, Tanzania, Kenya and Zanzibar. In Seixal, Portugal, we do also have an office where a majority of our developers work. On Zanzibar there is a unique concept where our client has an agreement with about 120 resorts to offer digital healthcare. Hence, in each hotel room there is a QR-code for hotel guests to scan for easy contact to healthcare and a doctor digitally. They have made the process of getting access to healthcare when you are abroad, a process that sometimes can be quite challenging, easier.
Could you tell us a little more on how you ended up working with a team in Portugal?
Well, rewind the track to the 60´s in Malmö, a city in the south of Sweden, where I grew up. During this time there were a lot of families who had arrived from Portugal (Lisnave) to work at Kockums in Malmö. The children of these Portuguese immigrants became my class-mates and friends at training. These Portuguese childhood friends of mine brought me to Portugal for the first time 39 years ago and I was immediately charmed by the country. The same people are still close friends of mine and now I have a house just 12 km south of Lisbon where I try to be at least a couple of months every year.
Anyhow, that is how my relationship with Portugal started. This combined with the great pool of IT competence here paved the way for bridging collaboration between Sweden and Portugal in my business. I have now worked with Portuguese people for over ten years and since 4 years ago we are in partnership with a Portuguese company who runs the development of our tele-medicine platform.
Do you have any interesting remarks or experience from working between Sweden and Portugal?
Having both a Swedish and a Portuguese team in Alteri Care has been great. Not only do the teams work together online on a daily basis, we also organise so that the teams can come to visit each other in person at least twice a year. This has been very appreciated among our employees and has allowed for a cultural exchange and new friendships have been established for many along the way. It is great to see. Personally, and as a leader, I do also value these trips. My belief is that collaboration in the workplace is much favoured when people get to know more than just the one-dimensional professional side of their colleague.
More so, I have long enjoyed working with Portuguese people. To generalize, I think they are prestigeless meanwhile ambitious, and it has been easy to build a good team. On the contrary, my understanding is that they see us Swedish colleagues as simple and honest. All in all, my experience of this collaboration across borders have been much appreciated.
