Andreas Dam, Founder & CEO, Daman
In today’s fast-paced business world, many leaders strive to deliver services depending on the market demands. However, there are a few genuinely exemplary leaders who focus on creating a positive impact in the lives of people by facilitating customer-centric products and services. They aspire to make the world a better place through their innovative skills and consistent effort while inspiring others to follow the suit. One prominent name among such exemplary and innovative business leaders is Andreas Dam, the Founder, and CEO at Daman, a software product house and digital agency specialized within healthcare.
Despite being born and raised in a family that is deeply involved with healthcare, Andreas decided to pursue Computer Science & Engineering. But coincidentally, he got an opportunity to work for a pharmaceutical company. And this is when he discovered his passion for helping people with a disease to live better lives, using digital technology. He realized that just making a lot of money as an IT consultant does not motivate him. Instead, he found his true calling in empowering patients and improving the healthcare system through digital and social technologies. Driven by this vision he founded Daman. Under the indomitable leadership of Andreas, today, Daman is helping innovative pharmaceutical companies develop life-changing solutions for people with chronic diseases.
Augmenting Healthcare with Life-Changing Solutions
Daman believes that the use of intelligent technologies and a data-driven approach will provide better healthcare services to individuals while reducing public healthcare costs at the same time. Thus, the company uses a leading methodology based on user-driven innovation, called co-creation to enable innovative brands to develop patient-centric solutions that improve treatments and out comes. Driven by a passion to change healthcare, the diligent team of creative strategists, user experience designers, anthropologists, data scientists, and programmers at Daman works in close partnerships with leading stakeholders to co-create and innovate the future of healthcare. It has also developed a digital health platform, Health Buddy to help people with chronic diseases enjoy a higher quality of life. This empowers healthcare professionals to treat people not just their symptoms. Currently, the company is advancing in the area of behavioral design, with affective design, and building an intelligent engine based on Machine Learning to deliver personalized patient empowerment. “I could also mention that our long experience in a number of disease areas, and market leadership in Rheumatoid Arthritis with RheumaBuddy is serving approx. 18.000 patients in Europe,” asserts Andreas.
Hurdles along the Way
When asked about the challenges in healthcare, Andreas expresses “Innovation speed is not so high in healthcare as compared to other industries. So, the journey has taken longer than expected. It has also taken several years to establish our brand and market position.”
Tackling all the challenges head-on, now the company is working with most of the top 20 global pharmaceutical companies, and it has also been chosen as the optimal solution provider by national health authorities. “On a personal note, it has also been a challenging journey – from an engineer “micro-manager” to a thought leader that can inspire others to join our journey and to inspire people in general,” he adds.
Key Attributes of Successful Leadership
According to Andreas, resilience and perseverance are crucial in healthcare. There is a huge opportunity in healthcare with digital technologies, and there are also many competitors. So, it requires hard work to succeed. The avid entrepreneur believes in servant leadership. He feels that a business leader should have a new mindset of build-measure-learn with the courage to say “we don’t know” and then approach with experiments, rather than having a “we-know-it-all” approach.
Drawing the key lessons from his entrepreneurial journey, Andreas advises budding entrepreneurs to learn about Lean Startup/innovation methodology. “A lot of products fail because they do not meet user (patient/HCP) needs or customer (payer/public healthcare provider/insurance) needs. You should fail fast, and find the smarter ways to do that in a highly regulated industry like healthcare,” opines Andreas.
Reshaping the Future of Healthcare
Advancing into the future, Andreas aspires to continue his exciting journey with Daman and enable pharma to be more patient-centric and digital with the digital health platform Health Buddy. This platform has recently received financial support from the EU for further advancement. Going a head, the ardent entrepreneur sees an immense opportunity to leverage all potentials of technology to create better and data-driven healthcare services.
“It really tingles me when I hear about people with illnesses. Besides helping people, I really enjoy the complexity of being a startup/scaleup, and motivating other people to join and enable our vision of helping 10 Mio people with chronic conditions, so they can live a better life. It has been a great personal journey for me as well, and I feel very grateful to have come to the point where I am”, he sums up.