As a patient and later a physician, Dr. Joseph Aubut was intimately familiar with the shortcomings of digital healthcare tools.
Aubut wanted to build a product to automate patient care orchestration (co-ordinating and assigning tasks), and make it easier for physicians to follow up with patients when they’re recovering at home.
Most of all, he wanted to “democratize” IT systems for hospitals, many of which he says are clunky, outdated, and difficult to customize.
Clinicians have “never been in control of how they deal with their follow-ups,” Aubut told BetaKit in an interview. “The IT is always a black box that they can’t touch.”
“Your team is already doing more than what it should be doing, and they’re already losing team members through burnout and depression.”
Joseph Aubut
Aubut’s startup, LeoMed, is aiming to break open the black box with a no-code platform for remote patient monitoring. Real-time health data, such as a patient’s vitals, are fed into a digital platform via wearables or hospital equipment, while the healthcare team can assign tasks on the care plan and get a bird’s-eye view of the most pressing cases, the company claims. Clinicians can build their own pre- and post-intervention questionnaires, with resources attached, which Aubut says saves time on patient consults.
The platform is compliant with Québec privacy laws for patient data, which is stored on Microsoft Azure cloud servers within Canada, Aubut said.
After deploying across several pilot projects and hospitals in the Montréal area, LeoMed has now closed a $2.75-million seed round led by Precicom, a Thetford Mines, Que.-based cybersecurity firm that assists LeoMed with its tech. Undisclosed angel investors also backed the round, which brings the healthtech startup’s total funding to $5 million after “little pre-seed rounds” consisting of some equity and some debt from backers such as Investissement Québec, Aubut said.
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Aubut said he doesn’t see his platform as a way to replace or automate labour, thereby reducing staffing, but rather to allow healthcare providers to do more with the resources they have.
“Your team is already doing more than what it should be doing, and they’re already losing team members through burnout and depression,” Aubut said.
Québec has the longest emergency room wait times in Canada, averaging more than five hours, according to a report from the policy think tank Montreal Economic Institute. The province is also contending with a shortage of healthcare professionals, particularly nurses, as they face high rates of burnout and excessive overtime, especially since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Québec’s health minister, Christian Dubé, said in 2021 that he expects the nursing shortage to exceed 28,000 positions by 2026.
LeoMed got its first deployment at Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM) via the government-backed MEDTEQ+ program, which helps bring new medical technologies to market. Now, the platform is used at the CHU de Québec, a Université Laval affiliated hospital system, the Institut de Cardiologie de Montréal, Canada Health Infoway, and several regional health centres throughout Québec to reduce post-operative follow-up times.
While a joint study on the CHUM project has yet to be published, LeoMed said that early results have indicated fewer rehospitalizations and returns to emergency rooms.
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LeoMed plans to use the new funds to expand its core team of four employees, expand into markets outside of Québec, and add features to its product, including some artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Not just “for the hype of AI,” Aubut said, but to improve the no-code tool that allows healthcare workers to make custom workflows.
Aubut conceded that building a product mainly for the public healthcare sector, particularly in the healthcare space, was not easy. Capital is hard to access, he said, and large healthcare facilities are wary of new players.
Despite the hurdles, Aubut said he would like to see more entrepreneurs innovate in the healthcare space, but cautioned that founders should be certain about their motivations.
“Is it the cash, or is it the cause?” Aubut said. “If it’s the cash…you’re going to have the worst time of your life. If it’s the cause, there are few other sectors that provide more satisfaction than really helping patients and their caregivers and their medical care team.”
Feature image courtesy Nappy via Unsplash.