Marcus Richards
Miznee seeks to recognizably contribute solutions to two key healthcare gaps. One being skincare for all skin tones, types and genders. The second is mental healthcare accessibility for all regardless of the socioeconomic or geographic community the patient is in.
It is broadly recognized that digital therapeutics will go a long way to solving these healthcare provision challenges.
We have developed highly innovative, AI based digital therapeutics products that deliver solutions to these challenges in dermatology and mental healthcare.
A core value of Miznee is that access to affordable basic healthcare must be available to all.
Tell us about yourself?
I am inclined towards problem solving by nature. As an avid ‘techie’, qualified engineer with interest in Psychology, I’ve sought to use technology to solve some healthcare challenges I became aware of.
I am especially interested in applying augmented artificial intelligence, where human experts are in the driving seat but are assisted by digital intelligence, and advanced imaging techniques.
My 30+ years of international business development experience while living and working on several continents exposed me to these challenges in skin and mental healthcare. I was and continue to b strongly motivated to build impactful and lasting solutions to meet the challenges.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
Filter out more effectively, unrealistic partnering and funding opportunities so as to spend more time and effort on tangible ones such as working harder and smarter to achieve partnerships with the NHS and other healthcare providers.
What problem does your business solve?
Broadly, access to affordable and confidential healthcare. Specifically, the same challenges as applies to skin health and mental health.
Both health statuses have immense impact on our perception of self-worth in society. When your skin feels and looks good, you can’t help but feel a greater sense of confidence.
When you are comfortable in your mind and society can see it, your chance for success, however you might define it, improves significantly.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
It is globally recognized that there continues to be a chronic shortage of qualified healthcare professionals, worse in rural and low income societies.
This is well documented by the World Health Organization, NHS et al. What if we could clone the expertise of these professionals and distribute the expertise over the Internet for easy downloading and interaction by patients?
Mental and skin well-being are two areas Miznee is aiming to have a positive impact with its technologies.
What is your magic sauce?
A strong desire to heal with digital medicine/digital therapeutics because I believe in it as a current and future solution to glaring gaps in our healthcare system.
Our Mirror online platform enables anyone to either use an existing skin photo or a quick selfie to get a full report on their skin’s health as well as recommendation primarily based on natural treatments. Any skin area of the body can be analyzed this way.
Our Perdeca online platform provides a fast and easy tool for mental healthcare experts to create generic or personalized digital sessions for patients to interact with, rather like assignments.
The sessions can be in any language, with text, images and audio. Perdeca also speaks in the different languages with different voice options also.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
We have been developing a smartphone-based product to measure blood glucose, lipids, blood oxygenation, blood pressure and heart pulse rate.
Would love to find collaboration opportunities and funding to progress and complete this smartphone-only product ASAP because such solutions are much needed, especially by those living with diabetes.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
Gaining any form of access to the NHS in the UK and to other recognized healthcare providers in and outside of the UK continues to be a real challenge.
Access to funding has been another restriction to our progress.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
We want major, recognized healthcare providers such as the UK’s NHS to offer collaboration with us. We want sources of business and/or research funding to discuss and hopefully offer financing possibilities with us.
We would also love to hear from telemedicine platform operators also as we can offer our products as add-on tools for their platform users and clinicians.
We offer demos and trial accounts.
For our Mirror, our skin health platform, please visit https://www.miznee.com and for our mental healthcare platform, please visit https://www.perdeca.com.
