Healthy.io has received a Financial Times/ArcellorMittal 2020 Boldness in Business Award for our pioneering work in utilizing the best of AI and machine learning to allow people to take urine tests comfortably and safely from home—using their smartphone.
The Boldness in Business awards recognize a select group of companies and individuals with novel answers to everyday needs, across a range of industries.
Among this year’s award winners are Levi Strauss for corporate responsibility, Tesco CEO Dave Lewis for person of the year, and Healthy.io in the technology category. The technology shortlist included several remarkable companies active in the healthcare space, including Verily, the life sciences arm of Alphabet Inc., and Neuralink, founded by Elon Musk, which is working to develop implantable brain-machine interfaces.
The awards were announced as the global coronavirus crisis reached new heights. Humanity is facing one of its greatest challenges in recent history, and it is only fitting that this year the prize jury chose to focus on companies catering to basic human needs. As Robert Armstrong of the Financial Times wrote, comparing the winners to businesses in an old-fashioned village:
I have just described to you this year’s winners: schoolhouse, doctor, tailor, bank, a couple of grocers. Does the line-up, so described, strike you as lacking boldness? It should not. Again, all companies serve unchanging needs. Boldness consists in serving them in a way others overlooked, doubted or dismissed.
The past weeks have brought Healthy.io unprecedented recognition, with honors from Fast Company, CB Insights, and now from the Financial Times and ArcellorMittal. But our focus has been on another kind of recognition, namely the growing demand for clinical-grade urinalysis from home in the face of the pandemic. By providing thousands of patients around the globe with access to our services, we’re helping lift the burden off of healthcare professionals and reduce unnecessary exposure for patients.
While The Financial Times recognized the vast market we’re addressing, and how offering our services can translate into huge savings for health services around the world, our boldness was credited to our innovation in solving basic human needs:
Yonatan Adiri, Healthy.io’s chief executive, shies away from making grand claims about transformation or the company’s technology, which uses software and algorithms to allow anyone to analyse their own urine at home. “You’ve never heard me promise disruption or an era after Healthy.io where healthcare would look completely different and be solved,” the 38-year-old says in a vegan café in New York.
For Adiri, Healthy.io’s technologies are about the decentralisation of healthcare, evolving from a top-down system designed to control communicable diseases to one where patients play a bigger role in managing chronic conditions. “I think we’re going to create the best company in the world that transforms the smartphone camera into a clinical-grade device,” he says. “We’re not going to do anything beyond that.”
Hear more about Healthy.io and our fellow nominees in the Boldness in Business technology category:
