Szymon Kostrzewski’s latest startup aims to transform healthcare through innovative technologies. Evidone focuses on creating technologies that improve the quality of healthcare and increase the efficiency of medical processes.
Dr Szymon Kostrzewski founded his first startup, KB Medical, as a commercialization of his doctorate, focusing on medical robotics. His dissertation focused on cervical spine surgery, but the technology developed by KB Medical has now extended to research on the entire spine. In just five years, the company created an innovative product, obtained the necessary certifications and sold the technology to a US company. Today, this advanced technology is used in hospitals around the world, including Poland.
After the success of his first startup, Dr Szymon Kostrzewski, decided to start a second company.
The startup, Evidone, is focused on artificial intelligence and was founded based on Dr Kostrzewski’s knowledge and experience. While developing technology for KB Medical, Dr Kostrzewski spent hundreds of hours observing operations in hospitals. “The operating room is constantly missing something – some tool, someone forgot something, there is no specialist or some other person is missing. A lot of time is often wasted. And one minute in the operating room is more expensive than one minute in space,” says Dr Kostrzewski. A lot of equipment is also wasted, he notes. Unneeded instruments are often opened, the subsequent sterilization of which is also very expensive. In addition, there is also a high staff turnover, which involves a constant need to teach new employees. Hospital administration and management often lacks real data to manage the operating room well, notes Dr Kostrzewski. It was from observing all these problems that the idea for Evidone was born.
Start-up Evidone
The startup is using computer vision technology and artificial intelligence algorithms to help the hospital improve the course of surgery. Evidone was founded in February 2024, although Dr Kostrzewski has been working on the idea for quite some time. At the current stage, they are preparing a prototype that will be installed in hospitals for pilot studies.
“We want to see if the system will ‘prove’ itself,” says Dr Kostrzewski, expressing the need to test whether the system will work as intended and meet the expectations.
Today, it’s difficult to get answers from the hospital about who should make sure a piece of equipment is there on time, or how often delays occur during the first operation. Only after obtaining objective data will it be possible to start optimizing all this, Dr Kostrzewski estimates. He adds that the technology being developed by Evidone will be like a partner in everyday working life.
“Our vision is not to innovate by supervising people, but by giving them the tools with which they can achieve better results themselves.”
Already more than a dozen institutions have discussed the new technology with the founder of Evidone. People working in the field, surgeons or nurses, are also showing great interest. He adds that he is positively surprised by how willing and open people are to the technology proposed by Evidone.
Need for innovation
Dr Kostrzewski notes that there is currently no technology in hospitals that deals with streamlining the process of performing procedures.
“There has been practically no innovation in this area in hospitals for a century. You could go back in time and see that back then the hospital operated virtually in the same way. Since then we have had an exponential increase in instruments, tasks, and therapeutic possibilities. The hospital can’t cope with it.”
He compares the organization of a hospital to a kind of factory, in which the product is human health. It’s the patient who “goes through” the hospital’s system, while other elements such as personnel or instruments don’t change.
“We have had great progress over the last hundred years, because we have been able to adapt the product to the production methods,”
Developments in manufacturing technology have made it possible to create products in a more efficient manner and to adapt them to the capabilities of modern production lines, which has significantly increased the efficiency and quality of manufacturing. He gives the example of a computer mouse, which is built to be comfortable for the user, but the components inside are designed to be easily and cheaply put together. Of course, and that’s a good thing, this is not possible with a patient, he says. In addition, the hospital environment is unstructured. Until today, there was no technology that could handle such an unstructured environment. It is only artificial intelligence machine vision technologies that can cope in a chaotic environment.
“That’s why today is the moment when we can solve these problems.”
In a classic factory, a robotic arm always reaches to the same place to the right or left. And in the operating room, everything changes, the patient does not lie in the same position throughout the operation. Patients differ in their anatomy and health problems. New technologies can take this into account and adapt the algorithm to such a changing environment, explains Dr Kostrzewski.
International environment and business management
Although Dr Kostrzewski currently lives in Switzerland, where he moved for the research for his PhD, he hopes to cooperate with the Polish medical sector in the future. He also praises the education system in Poland:
“It prepared me very well to work in an international environment. It also opened the door for me to study at many international universities.”
He divides the management of the company he founded in Switzerland into two key areas. The first is the administrative aspect, where he makes sure that finances and operations run smoothly. And the second, most important to Dr Kostrzewski, is making sure he offers something that people really want and that solves their real problems.
“I try to spend 80 percent of my time to understand whether what we offer meets the needs of customers and actually solves their real problems. Everything else follows from that.”
Trends in artificial intelligence
Speaking of artificial intelligence, Dr Kostrzewski, notes that every month major discoveries are made in this field. He notes that although it is hard to think, just a year ago Chat GPT was not well known. So it’s hard to predict what the trends will be, but he fears that artificial intelligence is facing oversaturation.
“The combination of a really fantastic technology, but with too much market enthusiasm, could lead to something similar to the Internet bubble twenty years ago. A lot of projects that don’t make sense today, but are only funded because of this bubble, will disappear. It’s going to be a difficult time until people begin to appreciate the true value of artificial intelligence.”
However, he disagrees with the often repeated fears that artificial intelligence will take away people’s jobs:
“It seems to me that it is rather the people who will be able to use artificial intelligence who will take away jobs from those who will not have such skills.”
He adds that we are only at the beginning of the journey when it comes to developing artificial intelligence. He compares it to the Internet in 1999, with a simple page that took two minutes to load and a buzzing modem. Back then, it was hard to predict what it would all look like now. It has its huge advantages:
“This is a great time to start a business. Wherever you look, you can find something new. It is much more difficult to enter a mature market. And today it is enough to master the field, in a sufficient way to plan a business. This is the perfect time to get started.”
Fot. Unsplash
