Jim Joyce, chief executive and co-founder of HealthBeacon. Photograph Nick BradshawSporting a suit-and-sneakers combo and open-necked shirt, Jim Joyce looked more like he was back courting venture capitalists than the stock market establishment when he turned up at his medical technology company’s debut annual general meeting as a listed company earlier this month.
The product he’s talking about is essentially a digital sharps bin that is a little bigger than a standard toaster. It is connected to an individual’s smartphone and used for the disposal of injector pens and syringes as well as to track individual patients’ adherence to medication regimes and to remind them to stay on track if necessary.
Joyce also has ambitions to expand into digital solutions for management of pill-taking in the future as well as selling weighing scales connected to mobile devices, which would help medical care providers to track the effectiveness of medications in the treatment of ailments like obesity and diabetes.
It was at Smurfit that he met his wife, Venetian Emanuela Saccarola, who was a visiting scholar at the time, and is now a senior executive with Citigroup in Dublin. Pharmacy group Uniphar, which was an early investor in the business, acquired the remainder of Point of Care in 2012 in a deal that allowed Joyce to take a project he was working on with him: HealthBeacon.
The company’s main distribution channel to date has been through deals with pharmaceutical companies, including Sanofi, Novartis and Teva, who cover the cost of the devices. It has also expanded recently into selling units directly to consumers in the US through home appliances distributor Hamilton Beach Brands, and is developing a sales channel where costs are reimbursed by health insurance programmes.“It accelerated the broad category of digital health adoption by years,” he said.
Of the dozens of Irish companies that have gone through a pre-IPO programme, called IPOready, that has been running at Euronext Dublin since 2015, HealthBeacon is the only one that has taken the plunge to date. It was also only one of two Dublin flotations last year at a time even as IPOs were running at a record rate globally.
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