Business in Vancouver’s “How I Did It” feature asks business leaders to explain in their own words how they achieved a business goal in the face of significant entrepreneurial challenges. In this week’s issue, Ryan Wilson, CEO of Medeo Corp., explains how he took the telehealth videoconferencing startup from concept to public launch in less than a year.
“Andrew Wilkinson [MetaLab] and Jesse Pewarchuk, our chief medical officer, came up with the idea. I was approached to be the CEO of Medeo in August last year. Back then it was called Cloud Clinic.
“My background is in delivering mission-critical technologies in different industries. I spent six years in the payment processing and financial industry, both with VersaPay Corp. (TSX-V:VPY) and Kubera Payments Corp. I raised our capital in September – over $1 million – and built the team in October. We’ve got over 35 people now working for our company.
“The first hurdle is: How do you make it work over the connections that consumers have? Skype doesn’t offer the security that’s required by law. We’ve had telehealth in Canada for 20 years, but always hospital-to-hospital, where they have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on equipment plus have fibre optics.
“We’ve licensed nearly 2,000 patents that allow us to have the compression and encryption technology to make it work either over 4G cellular or consumer ADSL and cable connections.
“The second hurdle is the security and privacy. We custom-built our own private secure [data centre] in the same facility that houses the B.C. government’s infrastructure in a strategic partnership with IBM (NYSE:IBM). We own the discs, we own the server – we’re the only ones with the keys to the information.
“We had a beta period where we worked with 50 or 60 doctors to help shape Medeo. There were all sorts of challenges we overcame. The simplest one is the prescription. If you’re not in the same spot as the patient, how do you give them their prescription?
“We invented an e-prescription system where the doctor can generate and sign it electronically. The patients print them out. Then we thought, ‘Why don’t we just skip giving the prescription to the patient altogether, and just electronically send it to their pharmacy, so by the time the patient drives to the pharmacy the prescription is already filled?’
“We had to set up the appropriate medical trusts, and then we set up all the electronic fund transfers to get payment from MSP and distribute it to all the physicians. We automate the billing, so when doctors want to do a Medeo visit, they don’t worry about billing.
“[Instead of using faxed referrals] we have an e-referral system, which refers you to a specialist or another physician on the platform with a couple of clicks.
“We expect to see more than a million users within a year. We’re going to focus on Canadian health care before we go into the U.S. market. We are already expanding into other provinces.” •
