Cork medtech company aims to grow jobs tenfold by 2020

Cork-based medtech company Genesis Automation is to expand into the US market and multiply its employment level tenfold by 2020, according to its chief executive.

The company’s key product is a system that in effect monitors and keeps track of the hospital’s stock “from tea bags to high-value implants”.

If stocks are running low or an expiry date is approaching, the system generates instant SMS and email alerts to management. It also creates a direct link between hospitals and suppliers, which are alerted to low stock levels as they develop.

"If you take implants as an example, the big problem is that they have a shelf life," says chief executive Noel O'Hanlon in an interview with The Irish Times. "Some of these implants could cost €50,000 each."

Genesis, which was designed in collaboration with the National Health Service in Britain, has 12 installations in the UK and is planning another 16 this year. Headquartered in Little Island in Cork, it employs 25 people, but Mr O’Hanlon says he expects to grow this number to 250 by 2020.

Debt financing

The company has received €6 million in debt financing from lender

IPF Partners

, which Mr O’Hanlon says was sought in order to avoid selling equity in the company.

The capital, he says, will be used to move into the US market with a new office planned for Tampa, Florida. Joint ventures and partnerships are also being developed in the United Arab Emirates for the Middle East market as well as Spain, Mexico and South America.

“The money will help us crack the US market,” he says. “If you think of the size of the US, there are 6,000 hospitals. The market potential for us is enormous. We do not have a direct competitor anywhere in the world for what we do.

“We’ve hired a lot more people to do more development, project management, and that kind of thing.”

In terms of the 250 jobs, he says about 80 would be based in the US with the rest “primarily in Ireland and the UK”.

He says the system would be beneficial in terms of reining in the spiralling expenditure in Irish hospitals. The first Irish installation has already been piloted at Cork University Hospital.

“It was very difficult for them to report where all the costs were going,” he says. “Now, we’re helping them analyse all that. We would hope Genesis will become the standard in Ireland. We’re talking to all the large hospital groups at the moment such as St James’s and Tallaght.”

The system itself is chiefly about identifying costs so hospitals can work to reduce them. “The theatre is the factory of a hospital,” he says. “That’s where the vast majority of things take place and where all the money is.

Procedure costs

“So when a patient goes into theatre, our system manages that. We know everything that’s being used for that procedure – all the implants, how long it took – so we know exactly what every procedure costs and how much it should cost.

"We then have an analytic system for analysing all the data we produce, so we can see all the key metrics and how the hospital is performing. That's very relevant to a public hospital like the NHS or a HSE hospital."