Public Payers Drive European Telehealth
Johannes Schildt & Claes Ruth, CEO and CFO of Kry, on the AI future of telehealth
The hard part of building a mass market telehealth company in Europe is not getting patients to try video visits, it is getting national and regional health systems to pay for them at scale. Kry started by charging near public system prices to prove the model, then spent its early years helping create reimbursement pathways. That matters because about 90% of its consultation revenue comes from public payers, and those contracts are what turn telehealth from a niche app into core healthcare infrastructure.
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Europe is fragmented, so public payer access has to be won country by country. The UK pays through the NHS, while Sweden and Germany are more regional or insurance based. Kry describes this local contracting and integration work as a major moat, and notes few telehealth companies have scaled meaningfully beyond their home market.
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Kry is built to fit public system economics, not just consumer convenience. It earns money from visits and increasingly from capitated contracts tied to enrolled populations. In Sweden, primary care spending is largely subscription like and linked to clinics, which is one reason Kry combined app based care with physical sites and partner lab networks.
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The clearest contrast is with companies like Doctolib, which mainly sell software to doctors. Kry argues the bigger prize is delivering care itself, because healthcare IT captures only a small slice of total spending. That is why public payer relationships matter more than software adoption alone, even though regional competitors still shape each market.
Going forward, the winners in European telehealth are likely to be the companies that look legible to public health systems, trusted clinically, integrated locally, and efficient enough to take on population scale contracts. As AI lowers the cost of handling routine cases, that should make subscription and capitation models even more attractive to public payers, which plays directly into Kry's model.