FAQs from prospects
Technical FAQ can be found here.
If you don’t know the answer on their question, say you will come back to this via email. It is safer to say nothing than to say something wrong.
About the company
Q: Can you tell me more about the founding story of Awell?
Awell is bootstrapped in Brussels in 2018 by Thomas Vande Casteele (current Awell CEO) and Yann Buydens. Thomas was an entrepreneur in e-commerce and digital marketing where he spent 8 years improving customer journeys for companies like Samsung, Audi and Nestlé before becoming obsessed with optimizing patient journeys instead.
Q: Can you tell me more about the funding history of Awell?
In April 2020 we raised $2M in equity from Localglobe & Moonfire and in May 2023 we raised an additional $7.5M from Octopus Ventures, s16 and a handful of strategic angels.
Q: How financially stable is Awell?
Awell is backed by top tier investors with a long term investment horizon who believe in Awell's mission. Awell just secured another round of funding (to be officially announced early Q3) ensuring at least 24 months runway.
To mitigate any remaining concerns, as part of a (paid) SLA we can enter into an escrow agreement where in case of bankruptcy or other impediment to Awell's business continuity the source code of the Awell platform is released to your organization.
Q: How big is your team?
We currently have a team of 15 people, the majority in product & engineering. We will be expanding our team drastically in the coming months.
Q: Who are your customers?
In Europe, we have 13 health systems using Awell (one of which is the biggest hospital network in the EU) and since expanding to the US 12 months ago we now have around 10 US-based customers (Patina Health, Wellinks, Commons Clinic, Better Health…).
Product specific questions
Q: If we design the care flows in your studio, do you own the IP or do we own the IP?
You will always be the IP owner of the care flow logic and the content within your care flow. We will, in no way, resell your care flows to other customers. The only IP we have is the SaaS tool itself.
Q: Which 3d-party tools are you integrated with?
Take a look at our marketplace.
Q: I’ve seen you don’t have an integration with TOOL X, can you add it?
I won’t be able to make any promises, this is a decision that is made by our product team. How we usually prioritize is that a 3d-party tool needs to be requested by 3 separate customers before we invest time and resources to make it available on our marketplace.
Q: We have our own homegrown tools, how can we integrate these with Awell?
We provide your developers with an easy-to-use SDK (in Typescript 🎉) so anyone can build extensions.
Q: Do you offer off-the-shelf care flows (e.g. “Here is a diabetes care pathway”)?
Although we have a pathway library on our website, we don’t offer any off-the-shelf care flows anymore. The reason is that we noticed that most of our customers don’t use this and it took us significant time & resources to maintain this. What we do offer is a library of +120 validated questionnaires (PROMs & PREMs) with corresponding calculation logic.
Q: Can you tell me more about your data stack?
Our data is hosted on Elastic (our data lake) and we have Kibana (a BI tool) on top of that. If you become an Awell customer, you’ll also get access to Kibana. We can also feed data to your platform so you can add your own BI tool (Qlik, Tableau…) on top of that. The gist is that you will have real-time access to all the data we collect (outcome data & process data).
Q: Can your platform scale to 100M patients?
Yes, we now have +200k patients on our platform and we recently did an API benchmark that concludes that Awell Orchestration API is scaling horizontally and can guarantee under 500ms response time on average.
Q: Can your team access our data outside the US?
Our stack is hosted on Google Cloud and is deployed in several geographical locations (we have a UK, US & EU environment). Given our deployments are regional, by design the data never leaves the region.
But you are correct that your production data can be accessed by Awell employees outside the US. This will only be the case when e.g. you encounter certain issues where our engineers and our customer success managers need to help. Please note that there is no specific regulation that says that PHI data can't be accessed outside the US (we checked this with our lawyers) and that all our US customers agreed to this clause (some of them are very large care orgs).
When they give pushback, we take a stepped approach:
What we do with our big customers is give them a list of who can access data from outside the US, with this they never got any pushback from provider orgs. Does that sound like the right solution to you?
We can work with a VPN or VDI
(If opportunity is huge) We will set up a separate environment for you that can only be accessed by our US-based team (Thomas, JB & Nam)
Sales specific questions
Q: Can I get access to your tool?
Yes, we always offer a 3-week no risk, free, trial to anyone interested in using the Awell platform. For that we’d like to schedule a call together with someone from our customer success team to better understand your JTBDs and the use case you’d like to use Awell for.
Q: What does your pricing model look like?
Awell uses a usage-based pricing mode based on Monthly Active Patients (MAPs). A patient is active if Awell performed at least one of the following activities for that patient:
Care flow was started
Action was activated
Reminder was triggered
A patient can be active in 1 care flow or 100s flows they will only be seen active once. We can trigger 1 or 100.000 activities for a given patient, they will only be seen active once. By using this pricing structure we don’t want to incentivize our customers to use as many activities per patient per month.
Please note that the patient does not need to have been active themselves. For example, the sending of a reminder marks that patient as active.