BY ANN BROWN
Two young tech entrepreneurs have come up with an app that helps doctors better track their patients and their medical histories. Deven Hurt and Simone Abegunrin, the founders of Hurt Technologies, both 21, recently debuted their first product, MedKit.
These two business partners founded Hurt Technologies in 2015; it was created out of an effort to make healthcare easy, accessible and affordable for all.
Hurt hails from Long Island, N.Y., and is studying bioengineering at Harvard; Abegunrin, born and raised in Los Angeles to a father from Ibadan, Nigeria, and a mother from New Orleans, Louisiana, is studying social studies at Harvard, with a concentration on international conflict resolution.
Hurt and Abegunrin discuss their new company and goals with TNJ.com.
TNJ.com: What made you decide to launch the company?
Deven: I decided to launch the company after speaking to Laura Butler, Microsoft vice president, about my introductory computer science project freshman year. My project was a proof of concept for an electronic medical records platform. Laura saw it and afterward encouraged me to turn the product into a company. I spent the beginning of sophomore year building a team and now here we are!
TNJ.com: Please tell us how the medical app works.
Deven and Simone: The medical records app works by allowing doctors to manage patients and their day entirely from an iPad. The app allows doctors to keep track of the patients they have scheduled for the day as well as record visit information for those patients via an intuitive interface, built around the physician workflow. All data is synced securely to the cloud, so physicians never have to worry about data loss.
TNJ.com: How did you get funding?
Deven and Simone: Up to this point, we have funded the project entirely ourselves with money from working and from our families.
TNJ.com: How did you two meet and why did you want to partner in business together?
Deven: Before approaching Simone, I knew that I would need someone with design experience to work on the user experience for our product. I made a list of students I knew who had done graphic design in the past, including Simone. Simone and I had met earlier sophomore year through an extracurricular consulting group. Out of everyone I most wanted to partner with, I asked Simone because we got along very well, she seemed like a
hard worker, and she, most of all, struck me as someone who really wanted to change the world.
Simone: When Deven approached me, I was considering a completely different track that would have taken me along the public sector route. However, as a person, ultimately, dedicated to directly impacting the maximum number of lives as possible, I saw this opportunity as a way to affect positive change much sooner and more effectively than my original plan, and I jumped at it. I was excited about the chance to combine my passions for the greater good–design, innovation, social change–however, what clinched my decision to join the company was Deven himself. He is one of the most visionary, dedicated, and brilliant people around, and I knew that together we could take on and change the world.
TNJ.com: What product is next?
Deven and Simone: Next, we would like to launch a tool that will increase patient visits to the doctor. People, too often, don?t get their required checkups and screenings even though these visits are essential to long-term health. Many people are also able to go to these visits for little to no cost because of their insurance plan and still do not go. We would like to get these people into the doctor?s office so that they can learn how to better take care of themselves long-term.
TNJ: Goals for 2017?
Deven: In 2017, we would like to start by seeing how receptive the market would be to our electronic medical records platform. I would also say this year we are going to be focused on looking ahead to our new product. We would like to completely outline what our next product will look like and start its development. Finally, we would like to successfully raise or be close to raising a seed funding round.
Simone: I would like to add that our long-term goal is to establish ourselves as a formidable player in the healthcare technology industry and a pioneer of effective and affordable systems that streamline health care for physicians, patients, and everyone in between.
