Sidekick Health

Sidekick Health aims to improve health outcomes for people living with chronic health conditions and encourage its users to establish lasting lifestyle and behavioral changes with its digital therapeutics innovations. The Cloud People helps Sidekick implement optimal IT security and privacy with resources and certified competence on the Google Cloud Platform.

Sidekick Health is a digital health platform delivered through a mobile app. Sidekick programs aim to provide people living with chronic health conditions with the opportunity to take a more active role in their health and disease management. Sidekick programs combine strong clinical validation with gamification, behavioral economics, and artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver a truly engaging and personalized patient experience.

We know that the patient journey is not a one size fits all. At Sidekick, we are developing adaptive care paths that can adapt to different patient needs, ensuring they have the best chance at improving their health outcomes and overall well-being
Tryggvi Thorgeirsson, Sidekick Health

Sidekick Health was founded in Iceland by Sam Oddsson and Tryggvi Thorgeirsson (pictured below), two medical doctors who had worked treating patients with lifestyle-related conditions for years. According to the WHO, by 2030, the proportion of total global deaths due to chronic diseases is expected to increase to 70 percent and the global burden of disease to 56 percent. Sidekick’s co-founders wanted to explore ways to prevent the rise of chronic conditions and help patients living with such diseases to manage them better. The programs developed by Sidekick aim to boost the quality of life of their users and trigger much-improved health outcomes.

“We have woven together behavioral science, clinical guidelines and medication adherence tools to work together to drive positive health outcomes. Sidekick uses behavioral economics principles to motivate people, improve engagement, and inspire positive behavior, it becomes in a way that makes it fun and effortless” says Tryggvi Thorgeirsson, co-founder and CEO at Sidekick Health.

When we consider the components attributing to good health, the results may be somewhat surprising. Alongside medical care, environmental and behavioral factors also have a significant impact on overall health.

The Sidekick platform is clinically rooted in clinical validation and is scalable across multiple therapeutic areas, supporting patients living with a variety of chronic conditions, from atopic dermatitis to breast cancer. Sidekick programs are designed to function as disease prevention tools and support programs for patients with chronic illnesses. 

“We know that the patient journey is not a one size fits all. At Sidekick, we are developing adaptive care paths that can adapt to different patient needs, ensuring they have the best chance at improving their health outcomes and overall well-being,” Thorgeirsson continues.

Until recently, Sidekick has completed all software development in-house with its own resources. The Icelandic startup has observed how challenging it can be to onboard the right people with the right skills and how difficult it is to make changes within a frankly outdated healthcare system. In addition, acquiring specialist expertise in all required areas as a startup company is not an easy task. For a health technology company privacy and IT security are particularly important, and privacy legislation becomes extra complicated with customers in Europe and North America.

“We got introduced to Sidekick because they wanted an independent audit of their security around Google Cloud Platform. We developed our “out of the box” package, and the customer was really impressed with the work and the delivery,” tells Tord Ripe, Managing Partner and Google Cloud Advisor at The Cloud People. 

Since its beginning in 2014, Sidekick has gained a lot of attention from pharmaceutical companies, health insurance companies, and investors. Sidekick has won several awards in the eHealth arena and is recognized as a digital therapeutics (DTx) leader. After signing several partnerships in the US and other overseas areas, the team at Sidekick needed more technical resources and support in setting up strict geo-location tenants. Therefore, Sidekick reached out to The Cloud People for more help.

With our revolutionary smart staffing solution – Smart Resourcing – Sidekick can access everything they need to create the right team with the right competence with a new world of transparency regarding pricing, experience, and certification
Tord Ripe, The Cloud People

“Seeing the level of expertise we could bring to their organization, the dialogue around providing a Smart Resource team started. It started as a trial, and after the test period, we delivered a fully scalable team, mainly based on Google Cloud Platform resources. We have been working as an integrated team within Sidekick, covering areas like architecture, AppDev, DevOps, test automation, and security,” says Ripe.

Google expert Ripe adds: “With our revolutionary smart staffing solution – Smart Resourcing – Sidekick can access everything they need to create the right team with the right competence with a new world of transparency regarding pricing, experience, and certification. The result has been more health features have reached the market at a high pace. With Smart Resourcing, it's also easy for Sidekick to scale up and down when needed.”

The Cloud People joins the exclusive club of Google Premier Partners, read more.