One medtech CEO is speaking up about how the sector can rally to help Ukrainians amidst its war with Russia. Invoking other companies to heed his call to action, Intrivo’s Chief Executive Officer Ron Gutman has put his money where his mouth is by having his company donate north of $1 million in testing supplies to the nation. Hospitals and healthcare facilities in Ukraine gratefully accepted the much-needed On/Go rapid test kits as well as population health management software and hardware, which happened to arrive just before the software’s accurately predicted COVID-19 case number spike.
“We became very concerned,” said Gutman. “We thought that the combination of refugee camps and COVID would create devastating consequences.” Thanks to other countries’ general embrace of asylum seekers, refugee camps haven’t been the necessity they might have been, but the COVID testing equipment was a boon for Ukraine’s otherwise preoccupied hospitals. “There’s a lot of movement of people either with injuries of war or with other issues, which could overwhelm the health system,” added Gutman, and he also pointed out that the nation’s lagging vaccination rates could “easily bring the entire healthcare system to its knees.”
Intrivo collaborated with NGOs and the local government on the On/Go for Good philanthropic initiative; just moving supplies into Ukraine presented quite a tough challenge. Seeking to make good on the promise of delivering mass quantities of sorely needed medical goods, as well as to promote improved teamwork in the medtech sector, Gutman is now working to build a coalition of U.S.-based startups to bolster Ukraine's healthcare strength.
