When Michael Levens was completing his Postgraduate Diploma in Entrepreneurship at Cambridge Judge Business School, even he may not have grasped the full potential of the new product he was focusing all his efforts on. Yet now, as his company launches TrackActive, its cloud-based platform for health professionals, he admits the future is incredibly exciting.
With 15 years’ experience in software development, mainly delivering large transformational projects to investment banks, Levens is the “tech” half of Active Health Tech, a health technology company that’s developing innovative exercise prescription and monitoring solutions for the medical, health and fitness industries.
Along with his co-founder Ian Prangley – a sports physiotherapist and strength and conditioning specialist; the “health” half – the company recently released PhysPrac, an i0S exercise prescription app aimed at individual therapists and exercise professionals. In its first six months, it was downloaded in the thousands. Now, the company is taking its blend of health and tech to the next level with its new product, TrackActive.
Levens describes TrackActive as “the physio in your pocket”. It’s a cloud-based B2B platform, accessible via web, tablet and mobile, which enables health professionals to prescribe customised, evidence-based programmes for patients with musculoskeletal diseases. Using images and videos, patients can learn how to do their exercises properly. The patient can feed back their progress plus any other symptoms and rate their pain on a simple 0-10 scale, and their health professional can check their adherence to their programme.
“There’s currently a lot of movement around getting physicians to ensure that extra activity is actually a big part of people’s lives,” says Levens, setting out the business case for the product. “Exercise is advocated as a prime way of preventing and relieving symptoms in a whole range of diseases. Plus, the health market is primed to undergo a transformation around cloud computing. So there are opportunities not just in private practice but also in the public health sector.”
Integrated public health systems are a vital element for success, as Levens himself readily admits. “We want to see TrackActive being used across hospital and health departments,” he says. “One key element will be reward-based activity – partnering up with health insurance companies so that patients could, for example, receive a rebate if they exercise.”
The company is also looking into integrating TrackActive with wearable technology such as smart watches and activity tracker wristbands, and expanding it to other health disciplines such as neurological, cardiac and respiratory rehabilitation.
He admits that 10 years ago launching this type of product would have been a lot more difficult, but these days everyone has embraced technology and most people have smartphones. He also points out that governments are behind in technology, and they know it. “So there’s a big push for governments to use technology in more innovative ways,” he says.
Currently based in Sydney, Levens is bullish about the future. “We want to be the global leader in this space,” he says, “and for TrackActive to be the go-to product across all allied health, extending globally. It’s an exciting time.”
Michael is interested in hearing from…
…people who are passionate about something, are ambitious and like to challenge the status quo, are creating innovative mobile solutions, or believe they can add value to our business.