Latvia has good doctors – the pain point is queues and distance, especially for patients living far from a major city or abroad. Roberts Lasovskis, CEO of Medon, believes an increasing share of doctor visits can happen just as well on a screen.
Could you briefly introduce Medon and the problem you are solving in healthcare?
Say your blood test results come back and half the numbers are in red. In Latvia, the usual next step is a call to your family doctor’s practice, a few days of waiting, and, for a specialist, often a few weeks. With Medon, you talk to a family doctor by video within the hour on a working day, and to a specialist within days.
Medon is a digital clinic. We are a registered medical institution with more than 100 doctors across 40+ specialties, so it’s a regular doctor’s visit: you get a written conclusion, and prescriptions and referrals go through the national e-health system.
The problem is simple. Latvia has good doctors and long queues. A large share of visits is a conversation and a look at test results, and that part does not need a waiting room.
What inspired you to build Medon, and what gap in the healthcare system did you identify?
It was Covid. I was out running and listening to a podcast where they talked about telehealth, and it made a lot of sense to me. Everything else in my life had already moved online, and seeing a doctor was the one thing that still meant a waiting room. I kept thinking about it, talked to a couple of friends who liked the idea too, and it started from there. A heart surgeon joined us as a co-founder within the first year.
The gap was not technology. Video calls existed. What was missing was a proper clinic built around them: verified patients, medical records, doctors who are responsible for what they say.
What makes Medon different from existing solutions in the market?
Three things. We are the clinic, not a booking site or a software vendor. The doctors work with us, and we carry the medical responsibility and, thus we can ensure top service. We are very proud of the fact that 98% of patients say they would recommend us. Remote comes first. For most clinics, a video visit is a side feature. For us, it is the main way we work, and we see patients in person when a case needs it. That is why the details get attention: identity checks, the questionnaire before the visit, the document afterwards. We are built to plug into others. Insurers and pharmacies can offer a remote doctor to their customers through us. Clinics can run video visits with their own doctors on our platform, under their own brand.
What has been the biggest challenge in developing and bringing your solution to market?
Habit. People have gone to a doctor in person their whole lives, and healthcare is rightly a conservative field. Doctors joined us faster than patients changed how they book a visit.
What helped was being boring and reliable rather than clever. Our biggest jump this year came after we rebuilt the patient side of the website. The number of visitors stayed about the same, and bookings went up by around 40%.
What are the key milestones you are currently working towards?
Connecting with the software that Latvian clinics already use, so any clinic can add remote visits without building anything. More insurers and employers covering remote consultations as a normal part of a health policy. Even longer hours for our express family doctor service, where we already do 14 hours on working days and 12 hours on weekends. An AI assistant that helps doctors with paperwork, built with partners. The doctor approves every word. A specialised tool for GPs to move their communication from WhatsApp to a safe environment.
The measure behind all of them is the same: how many of our doctors’ available hours turn into patient visits.
How do you see Medon developing over the next 2–3 years?
I would like remote care to stop being a separate thing. Wherever a patient starts, whether it’s an insurer’s app, a pharmacy, a family doctor’s practice or a national portal, a remote doctor should be one click away, and in Latvia I want that doctor to be ours. We see ourselves as the telehealth layer for the system, not a competitor to the clinics within it.
We have more than doubled every year for the past three years, so the direction is there. When this works in our home country of around 1.9 million people, then we scale and use our playbook in other markets efficiently.
What do you think is currently the biggest opportunity for healthcare innovation in Latvia and Europe?
Using the doctors we already have more effectively. Every European country is short of doctors, and training more takes about ten years.
Latvia is in a better place than people think. Prescriptions and referrals are digital, and most people have an electronic ID. The rails are built. What is still missing is the service layer on top of them. A small country is also a good place to test: one regulator, one e-health system, and you learn in months whether something works.
For Europe, the European Health Data Space should make it easier for that kind of work to cross borders. I am hopeful about it.
What would you like potential partners, investors, or healthcare stakeholders to know about Medon?
That working with us is easy. We are already a registered medical institution with the doctors, the processes and the platform, so a partner does not take on clinical responsibility or a long IT project. A branded page or a simple embed is enough to start.
Everything we do is about being lean, I mean our growth so far came on a small team and little capital. If you run an insurance company, a clinic, a pharmacy chain or an employer benefits programme and see a place where a remote doctor would help your customers, tell us where you see the fit.
