“We stand up to the health crisis”

The corona crisis caught Katrin Alberding cold – in the development phase of her start-up. Kenbi is the name of the company headquartered in Berlin that has set itself the goal of digitizing outpatient care. And that nationwide. A highly ambitious goal, given that the market for these services is considered a bureaucratic monster.

During the pandemic, an additional show of strength was required: “Decisions that we successfully made to protect our teams and patients had to be made with great uncertainty and, above all, quickly,” says Alberding. “Often faster than the government could support us.”

Alberding and her co-managing director Clemens Raemy did not let themselves be held back – on the contrary: “We have mastered the chaos and were able to grow in it,” she says. An energy boost also for self-confidence: “It gives us a lot of security.”

Decentralized organization – that is one of Kenbi’s success factors: the local teams organize themselves, so the nursing staff take on more responsibility. Not only that should increase satisfaction. In addition, the local teams are supported by a digital platform, which massively reduces administrative work. According to Kenbi, it was pushed down by 20 percent. The focus is on the well-being of the on-site staff, which is often neglected in care: “A happy team is the cornerstone of good care and satisfied customers,” says Kenbi.

At the same time, the founders also hope to be able to attract more young people to their industry in the long term – it would be an important contribution in the fight against the ever-worsening care emergency. Investors believe in the project – the founding team has already collected seven million euros.

Alberding takes responsibility – not just as a manager in your company. It is an unusual step for her to step forward onto the stage from her role in the background – “but something that I would like to tackle and with which I would like to gain comfort in order to create a much more far-reaching change”. Because for her it is also about change in society as a whole. Tolerance, respect, equality – these are issues that Alberding is committed to. And she wants to do it even more in the future.

Read the full interview here:

Do you remember what you wanted to be when you were little?
I always wanted to be a veterinarian until I was a teenager. At that time I even spent several vacations doing voluntary internships in a local veterinary clinic – I always found this job very exciting. When I was 16, a whole new world opened up for me when I went to the USA for a year on a student exchange.

After that, it went very international for me and in the end I decided to do a joint master’s degree in management and international relations in Scotland. After that, I always stayed in the global business administration branch, either in connection with the healthcare sector or with start-ups. And meanwhile I have (finally) been able to combine both.

How do you measure your success? Does money matter or are there other factors?
When we founded Kenbi, we wanted to build a company that we would like to work for ourselves. What drives us is our vision to change and secure health care at home for the long term for the better – not only for patients, but above all for employees, without whom the system cannot function.

That is why we measure success not only by the usual KPIs (turnover, patient numbers, etc.), but also by the well-being of our employees, by growth (i.e. encouragement for our model), by the quality of care and the time spent with patients can be – and how much relief we can achieve through digitization.

Does money matter? Naturally. On the one hand, the generation of profit is a helpful indicator that shows us whether we have created added value in the system – for example in the form of a better offer and more efficient supply. On the other hand, money is simply a means to an end in order to be able to further scale important success factors.

Are there character traits that are essential for a leader?
Some character traits – or learned behaviors – are certainly always relevant. For example, stamina and the will for self-reflection, especially in the start-up area. With other characteristics, I believe that it also depends very much on which leadership philosophy you believe in and in which environment you want to apply it.

At Kenbi, we do everything we can to strengthen our employees and we want to create opportunities for effective self-organization. To achieve this, you need flexibility in thinking, the ability to work in a team and a willingness to communicate in all directions. Some organizational talent is also important, because contrary to popular belief, self-management is anything but anarchy and above all needs clarity and transparency so that everyone can contribute to the important decisions.

Please complete the sentence: In conflict situations am I …?
… very involved. I’m certainly not the type of person who lets conflicts stand or avoids them, because that usually doesn’t solve anything. For me, conflict situations are temporary periods of time in which two parties have not yet found a common denominator. It is then important to find this, which is why I generally prefer the active approach in order to approach it in a solution-oriented manner.

That can certainly also be emotional at one point – I find that even important, because without it it is too close to “don’t care” for me, and it should never be if one is interested in a productive outcome.

The care market offers space for digital efficiencies

What were your three most important (work) results over the past three years?

Less than two years ago, Kenbi consisted of three founders (Clemens Raemy, Bruno Pires and I) and one idea. Today there are already more than 200 employees who together supply more than 1000 customers in three federal states over 21 locations. In addition, there is our tech center in Porto and our headquarters in Berlin – both equipped with fantastic teams of now more than 30 talents, who do everything they can to keep the nursing staff free.

To be able to induce so many committed people to join a completely new concept in order to face the health crisis together is an encouraging (interim) result that makes us very grateful and happy.

Another result of our work is the successful handling of Corona in a very exposed work environment. Since we’ve only existed since November 2019, Kenbi is a real corona baby and we had to grow up quickly.

Our concrete result: only two mild corona cases among employees, which we were able to completely contain immediately, for almost a year and a half, with well over 10,000 patient visits per month. The result makes us proud, because unlike any other area of ​​work, we in the healthcare sector cannot just let the gates go and take a break to think about what to do next.

The third important work result relates to digitization in care. We notice time and again that few can actually imagine something by this – most of them think of very limited niche products such as digital care planning or documentation.

However, the dusty, completely over-bureaucratic care market offers much more space for digital efficiencies beyond the entire care process, so that we now have a modular tech platform that digitally accompanies carers and patients from the start: from recruitment, through personnel management, e- We have already digitally created learning, care planning, documentation, communication (among carers and with relatives via the family app) through to billing and have made everyday care easier and improved the range of services. The beginning has been made noticeable, but here too we have a lot more plans.

Over the next three years: What do you want to learn that you can’t today?
Infinitely much – that is exactly what makes entrepreneurship so exciting. If I had to choose one thing, it would be to “get louder” – be it via social media, relevant committees, the press. Why is that important? We are currently spending all of our time pulling the strings behind the scenes to build a system that works very differently from the traditional one. But everything within very dusty structures.

In doing so, we collect a lot of knowledge from practice that could certainly be useful to politicians, the health insurers and society in order to find out more quickly from these structures. It is now important to establish this connection to the outside world – and to actively contribute to ensuring that the knowledge gained not only stays with us, but that concrete solutions from practice are linked to the decision-makers.

Integration, diversity and equality shouldn’t just be on the website

What is your long-term goal or your vision?
In addition to the vision that we have for Kenbi, my very personal vision is to be a positive “It works, you can do it and it takes you” example for women in business and as founders. Since my early twenties I have spent my entire career in very male-dominated environments, where I got to know both: teams and colleagues in which mutual respect and equality were not an issue; but unfortunately also many teams and individuals for whom discrimination and subtle as well as direct attacks were on the agenda.

It is no coincidence that I have now decided on an area in which women are the main drivers of the business and without them nothing would work. In the care sector, women are in the vast majority (at Kenbi almost 90 percent), many of them mothers.

It is very important to me personally to build a company in which integration, diversity and equality are not just on the shiny website, but are really lived. And thus to be able to somewhat reduce the desert-like gap in female pioneers in the start-up scene and in the economy.

If you asked your friends, what alternative career options would they suggest for you?
My friends would probably say that I am doing exactly what I should have been doing 15 years ago as an “alternative career option”. You will probably not get me out of entrepreneurship (whether in active or passive roles), but I could certainly imagine expanding the topic of development to other topics and areas in the future.

Maybe at some point there will be something with animals – although we can also accommodate that well at Kenbi, because our therapy animals team continues to grow with them.

Ms. Alberding, thank you very much for the interview.