Dr Harriet Treacy needed advice. So, just before Christmas 2021, She sat down with her mentor John Purdy, a successful entrepreneur and investor who co-founded Ergo in 1993.

Ergo began as a two-man retailer of printer cartridges and is today one of the country’s largest technology services businesses. Meanwhile, its financial services spin-off, Finergo, is today valued at more than $1 billion.  

Treacy was blunt. She was battling to get her start-up off the ground and told Purdy as much. “I said to John: ‘I don’t think we have a business here,’” Treacy recalled. 

With her co-founder Peter Lumley, Treacy had been trying to get Blood Brothers, an employee health and wellness benefits solution for men, off the ground. But they were finding it hard to get traction and win customers during the harsh times of lockdown. 

Purdy advised Treacy not to make a decision until after Christmas, to think about what she had learned to date, and whether there was an opportunity to pivot. “I started to look back at all the insights we had had,” Treacy said. “Was there something we had overlooked?”

Blood Brothers hoped to give men access to men’s health experts, men’s health blood testing, and curated health content, all from their mobile device. Treacy and Lumley had researched their first business idea in St. Columcille’s Hospital in Loughlinstown, Co Dublin which specialises in treating obesity.

But as Treacy and her co-founder Lumley thought about it, they realised that the length of time that people were being forced to wait for obesity treatments was too long. Treacy had treated hundreds of patients as a doctor suffering from health conditions such as type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, depression, infertility, and limb injuries that were due to having excess body fat. “I started to think if we could design a solution which was based on the science of obesity,” she said.  

“We knew many people were living with obesity and that they found it difficult to seek help. And when they did seek help they sometimes found themselves being stigmatised by healthcare professionals. 

“A lot of doctors don’t believe obesity is a disease. A lot of healthcare professionals talk about this idea of eating less and exercising more. People don’t have the arsenal of tools required to treat their obesity and as a result it has grown and grown.

“We have genetics that really want to gain weight. Telling people to eat less and exercise more doesn’t work. It is an overly simplistic solution to a very complex problem that hasn’t been understood properly.”

With all this in mind, Treacy and Lumley decided to launch a new start-up called Beyondbmi. The idea behind their new venture is to move beyond the traditional ways of thinking about body mass index to create a mobile technology platform that can demonstrate medical outcomes by giving obese people access to a doctor-prescribed weight loss medication, nutritional therapy and one-to-one accountability coaching. 

A global journey that ended in Ireland

On January 2, Beyondbmi announced it had raised a €525,000 pre-seed round to get its business up and going. Corporate finance advisors CKS helped the company raise the money from investors including Purdy, Paddy Dillon, head of corporate finance in Grant Thornton and Eoghan Quigley, a partner in KPMG.

Conor Sheahan, the founder of CKS and Declan MacGee, an investor and former venture partner in Elkstone also invested, along with a number of others. The funding is to launch the platform and grow the numbers using it from 30 people to hundreds of people. For Treacy the opportunity to try and deliver healthcare more efficiently is one she has been interested in since the start of her career.

After studying medicine in the University of Nottingham, Tracey worked in a hospital in Bristol where she got her first exposure to the obstacles holding back healthcare. 

“I noticed there was a lot of under-reporting of incidents in hospitals. Doctors weren’t reporting issues because the system was clunky, and there was a blame and shame culture of who is going to deal with this, and not wanting to get someone in trouble,” she said.

Treacy set up an anonymous telephone reporting line to allow medics to report freely. 

“After two weeks we saw an increase by 500 per cent of reports ranging from trivial to serious incidents,” she said. “The system caught on really well, but it was ultimately scrapped as the hospital didn’t have the resources to deal with it. That was my first real insight into resource and culture issues in healthcare.”

After two years in Bristol, Treacy moved to work Royal North Shore, a trauma hospital in Sydney, Australia. “There were gunshot wounds, knives, and lots of normal stuff like car crashes,” she said. “It was really good – well paid and with a better work-life balance.” 

Treacy’s interest in how hospitals operated continued to grow, and she started to learn about value-based healthcare, a delivery model where hospitals and doctors are paid based on patient health outcomes.

“Financial incentives are aligned as healthcare providers and insurance companies both financially gain by keeping well,” she said.

Treacy heard about a doctor and entrepreneur called Rushika Fernandopulle who had co-founded and led a healthcare business, Iora Health. 

Fernandopulle had built a primary care group from scratch with the mission of “restoring humanity to healthcare”. At the time Fernandopulle, had 49 practices and he invited the then 27-year-old Treacy to see them when she contacted him. For six weeks Treacy visited cutting-edge healthcare facilities in Boston, Arizona, and Dartmouth. “I was blown away by the way the practices worked,” she said. 

“They had flat hierarchies with GPs, behavioural psychologists, and health coaches all working together.”

Treacy said she was particularly interested in seeing how health coaches could work with clinicians to deliver better patient outcomes: “Health coaches build empathy and listen. They can spend a lot more time with people helping them achieve their goals.”

In 2021 Iora Health was acquired in a $2.1 billion all-share deal by Nasdaq listed One Medical, a membership-based primary care platform. At the start of this month the combined businesses were bought by Amazon for $3.9 billion in cash. 

“Rushika was amazing, a real visionary,” Treacy reflected. “He was similar to me in that he was disgruntled about how healthcare was working. He started the business when a guy gave him $500,000 to go and test his business. He went off and did that – and then ten years later sold the business to Amazon.

“I didn’t know that at the time, but he did make me think I want to do something – and it is possible to deliver healthcare better.”

Treacy was now on her way to launching her own start-up.

Making a difference

When Harriet Treacy moved to Ireland, she enrolled in an entrepreneurship programme called New Frontiers in TU Dublin Tallaght. She combined her studies with working as an emergency medicine resident in nearby Tallaght University Hospital. At the time Treacy hadn’t fleshed out her ideas for a healthcare start-up. “It was an awakening as I realised I was a doctor and not a business person,” she said. “I didn’t understand commercialisation and I needed to bridge my skills gap.” 

Treacy thought about doing an MBA but felt that was more aimed toward someone who was already running a business. She decided to do a Masters in Design Innovation instead. “It was a bit left field as it was all about human-centric design and doing research by listening to people and seeing how they behave,” she said. “It turned out to be a great course.” 

On the course, she met her co-founder, Peter Lumley. Lumley had worked in the motor industry with his family’s business, but his real love was design and innovation. “Peter had a creative streak in him that didn’t have the opportunity to be expressed,” Treacy said. Treacy and Lumley worked together on various projects in university and then decided to found Blood Brothers. In early 2022 they pivoted and launched Beyondbmi.

Her new venture believes it can help its patients achieve a sustainable 15 per cent weight loss over 12 months by giving them access to a medically led team of doctors, dietitians, nurses and health coaches. Giving patients access to all of these experts via an app on their mobile phone means they are not spending months, or even years, waiting to get access to experts.

For medical professionals it allows them to manage more patients in a manner that suits them as they can communicate via the app rather than having to see them in physical settings.

“There is a real issue with access to care,” Treacy said. “One in three GPs are leaving the profession because of working conditions or age. We’ve got a real problem. We want to increase access by offering digital services. We also think we can change the business model so doctors and clinicians can have more flexible working patterns.”

Beyondbmi is building a team of experts that include obesity scientists and clinicians Professor Alex Miras, Professor Carel Le Roux and Dr Werd Al-Najim. It has a recurring revenue by getting patients to sign up on a monthly basis.

“We have a subscription model,” Treacy said. “We believe we can support chronic disease management in a much better way than the traditional bricks and mortar transactional model. This feeds back into the original idea that inspired me of value-based healthcare. I want to be able to build something that can show proven outcomes and allow people to take control in their own hands and say ‘I want to get good care for my condition, and I can.’”