How did ETD Consultation come about?
Jérôme Elias:I'm a dental surgeon, and I worked as a consultant to manufacturers in the dental sector for 12 years, alongside my activities as a practitioner and lecturer at Nancy University. In particular, as a consultant I worked on the development of new products and applications, with the aim of bringing them to market quickly. One of my main motivations was to make it easier for most of the population to access high-level care. I wanted to do more in that area, so I created ETD Consultation in 2013.
What are your main areas of activity today?
J.E.:Our business is to help the various parts of the dental profession improve their processes and gain access to the best technology. By doing that, they can cut costs and raise care levels. This requires organisational advice, help with recruitment and training, but also specialist ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software or access to a purchasing centre. Our main client in this area is Dentifree which, with its 13 care centres, is the leading non-mutual network in France. We also work closely with certain manufacturers to develop applied digital solutions in the implant segment.
What are your main areas of future development?
J.E.: We are focusing heavily on the development of e-health, which is still in its infancy in dental surgery. We are working on mobile applications to help practitioners make decisions, enabling them to optimise the work they do through prior assessment of risk factors. For that purpose, we have mapped data collected from hundreds of patients. We have also made great progress in the 3D design of surgical guides, which help make surgery as safe as possible. However, our most ambitious developments are in 3D printing. In partnership with leading players in the additive manufacturing sector, such as Prodways, we are now capable of producing implants and crowns with materials such as PEEKTON, which has until now been used mainly in the aerospace industry. The big advantage of these products is that they contain no metal and are biocompatible.
What do you get from your partnership with Crédit Mutuel Equity?
J.E.: As well as the vital stability provided by an investor that is committed over the long term, it gives us access to a whole ecosystem. Their close links with the mutual health insurance sector.
What the partner says
Crédit Mutuel Equity supports ETD Consultation because we strongly believe that its offering ts with the changes underway in the sector.
We met Jérôme Elias and his two associates, shortly after the company was founded.
Their development plans were very attractive to us. They tallied with the major changes that are currently transforming dental surgery, such as the use of increasingly integrated digital solutions (from patient mouth scans to the personalised production of prostheses, guides and implants), increasingly specialised training, improvements in operating rooms, the use of new materials and data management. There are many areas of development and dental surgeons must maintain a high level of training and practice, while receiving advice regarding their choices.
We were keen to support a company that has the expertise, technologies and tools to disseminate and support These changes.
Crédit Mutuel Equity has been able to provide that support by giving ETD Consultation access to new contacts, related ecosystems and discussions with specialists, enabling management to hone its model and adjust its offering, at a time when multiple choices and strategies are possible.
ETD Consultation in brief
14 100 patients supported
since September 2014
96.7% of Dentifree recommendation
rate
€3.7m of revenue in 2016