Ottawa-based PatientWay was founded in March 2010. Early on it became a client of York Region’s ventureLAB to access healthcare mentoring and funding expertise and proximity to large GTA medtech markets. Supplying healthcare self-registration kiosks, the company is led by entrepreneur, veteran software developer CEO Jay Lawrence and COO Andrew Bailes, a Queen’s MBA.
Getting from a great idea for to a winning technology and sales success in the difficult health care innovation ecosystem is no easy feat.
Jay Lawrence’s journey began when Southlake Regional Health Centre (SRHC) in Newmarket was actively researching the ‘best practices’ of hospitals all over North America. While consulting with Southlake, he observed that patients were “the most under-utilized resource in healthcare”.
So obvious a fact that…it was almost invisible.
Self-service seemed a key to turning a problem into a resource. Lawrence started a pilot project to make patients a more active part of the registration and check-in process. Saving the hospital significant time and money and increasing patient and staff satisfaction were important isues. After testing against these benchmarks, SRCH chose to work with PatientWay to develop a solution to streamline patient registration through the use of online pre-registration and self-check in technology. And by January 2011 the first installations of PatientWay’s self-registration kiosks were up and running at SRCH’s Stronach Regional Cancer Centre in Newmarket.
PatientWay significant customers have grown in number. One of Canada’s largest hospitals, several big community hospitals and a number of smaller community hospitals are onboard. Close to home, Southlake Regional Health Centre, Rouge Valley Health System, North York General Hospital, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and the Quinte Healthcare Corporation have all adopted the PatientWay solution. And down east, the Nova Scotia Capital District Health Authority has signed on. Their first successful US install in Michigan too be announced soon is getting rave reviews.
Lawrence feels that PatientWay has proven its value to its target market. Now he is going after the broader market. He hopes to make PatientWay the self-service technology of choice for North American hospitals and medical clinics. To do that he is leveraging systems integrators and resellers in different regions to reach a huge healthcare market opportunity. It looks like 4,000 hospitals in North America could benefit from Patientway’s solution $700M in potential revenue. More than 50,000 medical clinics with six or more physicians are also prime candidates with a potential of $1.8B.
Four short years on PatientWay provides an integrated bundle of applications that streamline the flow of information about patients from their primary care physician through to the clinical area of a hospital. They manage referrals, provide online scheduling and pre-registration, as well as reminders and check-in kiosks.
In a lot of hospitals. PatientWay is the vendor of record at 87 hospitals, or about 15 per cent of the total Canadian Market.
Lawrence says that “the only way that a process improvement initiative is going to work is by utilizing emerging technologies – and that’s what we bring to the table. We streamline patient access through web, kiosk and mobile apps.”
Streamlining healthcare systems is big business.