Waive Medical wants to ease administrative burden for health-care professionals so they can focus on patient care
After frustrating experiences with the health-care system, two young entrepreneurs decided to do more than complain about it. They set out to fix it.
Now their Sudbury-based med-tech startup is getting noticed far beyond Northern Ontario, having been accepted into the Google for Startups Accelerator: Canada accelerator program, an opportunity the business owners hope will support the company’s growth.
Shreyansh Anand and Tabassum Pasha are originally from the Greater Toronto Area but met while studying at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont. They founded Waive Medical in 2020 and moved to Sudbury after being accepted into the Sudbury Catalyst Fund, a venture capital fund administered by the Nickel Basin Federal Development Corporation in collaboration with the City of Greater Sudbury, NORCAT and FedNor.
Today they work with a team of software engineers and business specialists remotely, through a central office located at NORCAT.
“We both had our own difficulties accessing health care as we were growing up,” said Anand. “When I was younger, my father got into a very bad kitchen accident and we rushed to the closest hospital. We ended up waiting over eight hours overnight before he got the support he needed.”
Nowadays, he realizes that waiting that long in the emergency department in Ontario and across Canada has become the norm.
Meanwhile, Pasha had to wait nine months to see a specialist, only to learn that her referral was lost, forcing her to start over and face another nine-month wait.
“The reality is that we as patients are not getting the health care we deserve, but the deeper we looked into that, we found that the staff are overwhelmed, the doctors are overwhelmed, everyone is overwhelmed,” said Anand.
“We decided that if we wanted to help patients get the health care they deserve, we first had to figure out how to get staff and doctors into a place where they can provide that health care.”
Then the pandemic hit. And the heath-care system had pivoted, presenting an opportunity to the two ambitious university friends.
“At the time, we created a decentralized waiting room,” explained Anand, “which allowed patients to wait from their car, from their homes and our system would inform them when it was appropriate to come (to the clinic), based on travel time and delays.”
Anand cold called 30 clinics around the GTA to gauge interest in the software they developed, called WaiveTheWait.
“Three clinics picked up the phone and two said they would give it a shot,” said Anand. “One was in Brampton, Ont., and the other in Hamilton, Ont.” Both clinics adopted the technology, becoming their first clients.
Anand said that technology no longer exists because when the pandemic ended, so did the urgency for the application.
However, these initial business relationships allowed Anand and his business partner to understand what was causing clinical and administrative burden and explore what could be done to help health-care professionals concentrate on patient care.
Fast forward to the current platform, Waive Medical, software that uses AI to automate clinic administrative work, like paperwork, patient communication and task management. It is now used in more than 250 clinics across the country by both solo practitioners and large medical groups, including North Bay General Surgery. Anand said there’s room for growth.
The Google-sponsored accelerator program, which his company is now part of, empowers tech startups to grow faster and smarter by offering mentorship, access to advanced tools and AI, training and industry connections.
“We are doing a lot of work to help alleviate the pressures that staff are facing,” said Anand. “But we know there’s a lot more left in health care that, at this point, has changed the way a doctor works in the last five years, has changed how a doctor works in the last 10 and 20 years. And not necessarily for the better.
“So, we are trying, in some ways, to turn back the clocks and give doctors the time they had 20 years ago.”
Anand said that as technology and tools have evolved in the health-care field, so has the amount of data, which has created overwhelming administrative tasks.
“Our hypothesis as a company is that with every new tool, every new technology, every new device, from the Apple smartwatch to AI Scribe, all we are doing is creating more data,” said Anand. “And at the end of the day, there is only one person reading through that data and adding more, making their life miserable.”
The challenge, explained Anand, is how to eliminate excessive information and provide only what is needed. Addressing this gap is a key focus on the team’s research and development.
And while Anand realizes there are most definitely applications beyond health care, “until that’s solved, it just doesn’t feel right to try and look elsewhere.”
