Dear Mr McDermott,

I am very sorry for your recent eye accident. I just read several articles on various online publications about it. I particularly appreciate the way you manage that adverse event… “It’s important to stand back up again, if you fall down”. And you seem to wish to push SAP into more healthcare projects.  Good!

Welcome to the club, M McDermott… I am a 51 years old entrepreneur and 8 years ago, I was diagnosed with blood cancer (leukemia). And as you say: “I’m still alive.” I am very fortunate to be treated by a magical pill called Glivec, from Novartis.  The same year, 2007, my son Pierre, then 10 years old, was diagnosed with bone cancer.  Two cancers in the family, at 3 months interval.  No fun.  But he is also alive today.  He lost his leg to the cancer, but he’s still enjoying life, sports, friends… His whole story is at pierre.keunen.net

Last year, I was fortunate enough to sell my software company Manex to Lampiris, one of the new green energy players in Belgium. Yes – we are neighbors Germany – Belgium.

So I decided last year to invest some of my money in a new, hopefully disruptive project to improve healthcare too.  Like you, when we were in hospitals for my son and I (more than one year in our case), I realized that there is still a lot of work to do to make sure doctors, patients, and all related health care practitioners have the right information at the right time – while still preserving privacy.

So I used my expertise from 3 large scale successful projects in Belgium (in EHR and secure medical messaging) to build a new solution that I called Andaman7.  Andaman is an island that, according to wikipedia, was isolated from the rest of the world for a long time.  Pretty similar to the current medical IT situation.  And the 7 is for HL7, but also 2007…  that famous year for our family.  Andaman7, the company, is a 1 year old startup but we’ve been working for 3 years on the technology.  We just raised our first 1.3M€.

So welcome to the club!

And if you see collaboration opportunities, let’s talk.  Small can help big, big can help small.  🙂

Vincent Keunen

vincent.keunen@andaman7.com