Last year, Siilo achieved a major startup milestone: we secured Series A funding. For many companies, this is an opportunity to reflect on how far you’ve come and establish clarity for where you’re going next. We were no exception. In this post we share the critical decisions we’ve made and the actions we’re taking to set ourselves up for success in the coming years.
Our Purpose
A single patient needs care from multiple different people with a variety of skill sets, but these people are incredibly siloed, even when they work in the same building.
We aim to bridge those communication and collaboration silos so that every healthcare professional has a simple, secure, and easy way to discuss patient information and coordinate care across these boundaries. We bring the “eyes” and their corresponding perspectives together in Siilo.
While messaging is still at the heart of our company, we’ve learned that our users are overcoming other collaboration-based challenges with Siilo. By better understanding these diverse challenges, we can deliver improvements and functionalities that are designed specifically to address them.
For example, when users discuss their patients on our platform in a 1‑to‑1 or a group chat, they often consult each other about multiple patients at the same time in the same conversation. As a result, information could get missed or attributed to the wrong patient in the chaos. To curb confusion, users began creating specialised group chats to address one patient or treatment at a time — but that led to a lot of noise and a surplus of group chats. We created the Cases feature to allow users to keep patient- or treatment-specific information together within an existing chat. Cases have since become one of our most popular features with healthcare professionals across the board.
We know that different roles in healthcare have different needs, but the tools and tech in healthcare have historically been pushed from the top down and not designed for the practicing professionals. Siilo shifts perspective to a bottom-up approach, developing products for the people who actually use them on a daily basis.
We’ve updated our company purpose to reflect this evolution:
By connecting modern healthcare professionals through trusted networks, simplifying their workflows, and democratising access to expertise and experience, we can improve their quality of life and ultimately patient care worldwide.
Moving forward, we will make certain that everything we do as a company ties back to this statement and, above all, to you, our users and partners in changing healthcare for the better.
Our 2021 Focus Areas
As a company, we’ve identified two key goals to focus on as we work towards this purpose.
Siilo users create and join trusted networks to collaborate on patient cases and ensure compliance as they communicate across layers of healthcare. This week we surpassed 300,000 members who have exchanged 500 million messages. While it’s certainly a moment to celebrate, there is still plenty of work to do. To continue growing our vision of network medicine, we plan to bring new users to the platform from new markets, onboard them with the information they need, and provide the additional support that guarantees Siilo a place in their workflow toolbox.
The second is to make the Prisma Network a success. What started as a Siilo chat group with GPs and orthopaedic surgeons has since evolved into a network where GPs across the Netherlands can post cases and receive advice on best practices from specialists spanning 20+ specialities. With Prisma, we aim to onboard more GPs, make it easier to resolve patient cases, support continuous learning, and strengthen our relationship with local insurance providers.
Our Core Principles
In order to continue growing trusted networks across healthcare, we established core principles that both celebrate what has made us successful so far and give us the tools to prepare for what’s next. For us, this is our value set, consisting of six tenets that guide our internal and external interactions.
We act in service of our heroes: healthcare professionals. Their challenges, motivators, and perspective are at the forefront of every product decision, brand element, and company effort.
We value learning over all else. We aren’t afraid to experiment, change, or challenge the status quo.
We simplify where we can because healthcare is complicated enough.
We take accountability for our actions when things go to plan and especially when they don’t.
We advocate for a level playing field where everyone’s diverse experiences and skill sets are treated with equal value.
We believe good days and bad days are a fact of life but still look for opportunities to make each other’s and our users’ days a little bit brighter.
Our Brand Refresh
However, all of this is just words until they become actions. We’ve already begun taking steps to start holding ourselves accountable.
If you’ve recently updated your Siilo app to version 6.0, you may have noticed that things look a little different. We’ve refreshed our brand to better reflect who we are, what we value, and where we are going. Here are the design decisions behind some of the notable changes:
App Icon: The fresh yellow dot in our new app icon indicates where Siilo stops and healthcare collaboration begins. We’ve made it yellow to highlight what’s important, which is that Siilo is your starting point for a simple, secure, and collaborative way to practice medicine.
Logo: The adjusted spacing and size of our logo reflects the sense of consistency we want to bring to our brand. Consistency communicates trust, and trust is essential to building strong networks.
Font: We chose Siilo’s new font, TT Norms, for readability, ensuring that every message exchanged can reliably (and literally) be seen.
Colours: Upgrading our colour palette was as much an aesthetic choice as it is a strategic one. We’ve deepened the text colour, Night Shift, to help it stand out against bright white screens, enriched the Highlighter Yellow to call attention to what matters, and added secondary colours to make our communications more compelling.
The brand refresh is just the beginning, we hope to continue with meaningful improvements to our website, our product, and our processes. Your continued support and enthusiasm for Siilo has allowed us to get where we are today, and we can’t grow into our vision without you. Thank you for trusting us to be your point of connection and collaboration. We ask that you please continue to share your suggestions and ideas with Team Siilo. Let’s practice medicine together!