ISSUES

Contents

(Companion Animal Digital Health Session 5)

Felcana & Companion Animal Digital Health Overall Market Trends

James Andrews_Chief Executive Officer, FELCANA

 

Dr. James Andrews talked about Felcana and Trends within the companion animal healthcare space. In 2015, Dr. Andrews set up a pet technology business called Felcana pioneering in telehealth particularly in wearable technology for companion animals primarily dogs and cats. Dr. Andrews started Felcana as a pet wearables business but its product includes offering remote monitoring products that goes on a dog or a cat's collar which measures activity levels. It has an accelerometer inside with some fairly miniaturized and fairly complicated electronics which transfers data collected through accelerometers to the cloud that analyze data in terms of activity and movement of behavior patterns in dogs and cats.

Image Sources: Zoom Presentation Screenshot by Dr. James Andrews

 

Storing and analyzing data is relatively substantial to pet behavior. As the utilization of data, enhancement and refinement of algorithms that retrospectively analyze data and draw out new insights for customers is necessary. Felcana’s products are very consumer focused while the company has been working very closely with both pet owners. This product is comfortable, durable and lightweight and also the most technically advanced pet wearables in the market.

Felcana is still in the very early stages of commercialization and its primary customer base is in the UK, but also serve customers in many parts of the world including a number in South Korea. He also explained Felcana’s second product which is a symptom checker that effectively asks pet owners simple questions about their pet's health to help signpost where that pet owner should go for appropriate treatment in many situations, that'll be a Veterinary Clinic but perhaps in other situations it may not be it may be a physiotherapist. Due to animal problem which are totally unrelated, Felcana’s product signpost pet owners to the right advice through its symptom checker as this product acts as a feedback loop for remote monitoring wearable products. Most pet owners can use the symptom checker to gather more information about some strange and unusual activity of their pets. Morever, it acts as a nice feedback mechanism for Felcana to gather more data and improve its algorithms. Dr. Andrews continued to explain more about its third product which is a healthcare content diagram that helps drives traffic through search engines to website to sell more products. This also provides user base with credible healthcare content used to help solve common problems with their pet.

Image Sources: Zoom Presentation Screenshot by Dr. James Andrews

 

Then the talk continued with the trends in technology and digital innovation in the companion animal sector. The first one is increasing pet ownership across younger demographics which have been occurring for a number of years now but has accelerated quite significantly during the pandemic. The increasing number of younger pet owners have look after and have adopted dogs and cats which ultimately means pet owners are more digitally enabled in more modern in their approach to pet ownership. The second trend is related to sophisticated treatment options so veterinarians are able to provide more sophisticated treatments to their patients. The third trend is related to growing popularity of pet health insurance and some health insurance policy which helps cover the cost of their veterinary care and ultimately enables more sophisticated treatment options to be pursued. Then the fourth trend consolidating veterinary clinics into larger groups historically a veterinary clinic in the UK would have employed probably two to three veterinarians and be you know entirely independent these days the majority of veterinary clinics in the UK and in many similar countries in Europe and in North America are now consolidating into larger veterinary clinics but also larger Veterinary groups.

Finally, Dr. Andrews ended his talk with his thoughts on the next generation of companion healthcare and modern animal innovation.

Image Sources: Zoom Presentation Screenshot by Dr. James Andrews