Kara LeBlanc knows a thing or two about procurement headaches.
Straight out of university, LeBlanc worked for more than a decade on procuring multi-million dollar healthcare contracts in both Canada and abroad. She says those were days of Excel spreadsheets, brochures, and disorganized boardroom meetings. That’s why, in 2020, she founded MedReddie out of Saint John, NB: to speed up and simplify the healthcare procurement process.
The company now has five employees, three of whom are in Waterloo, Ont., and earlier this month secured just over $2 million to go global.
Replacing hospital equipment is “a very high-stakes decision, and something we ought to get right from the beginning.”
MedReddie’s platform provides procurement teams with a centralized list of vendors alongside relevant regulatory, clinical, and performance metrics so they can evaluate medical technologies faster. LeBlanc explained in an interview with BetaKit that she would join group purchasing organizations (GPOs) and hospital teams as they experienced “information overload” learning about all the possible products and services for their needs from brochures.
MedReddie provides that information in “a more structured way,” scraping publicly available info and allowing suppliers to control their MedReddie page as if it were a LinkedIn profile. LeBlanc recalled how purchasing committee members would be completely unaware of feature advancements because they had been so accustomed to their old equipment.
“If you didn’t have that evaluation criteria to make the decision that you felt was critical to deliver care to treat your patients for the next decade, that’s a very high-stakes decision, and something we ought to get right from the beginning,” she said.
LeBlanc claimed that MedReddie also helps drastically cut down the time it takes to generate sourcing documents, like requests for proposals (RFP), from months to minutes, while actually accounting for a hospital’s different needs. LeBlanc explained that terms and conditions often remain the same, but requirements and the sourcing evaluation criteria are unique for each circumstance.
“There are no tools, and folks are just referring to … an old RFP that they did years ago, which is already irrelevant because the technology has changed completely,” LeBlanc said. “When I went to build this company … I wanted to make sure that all requirements and all the [sourcing documentation] is all net-new.”
RELATED: Armed with $782,000 CAD in pre-seed funding, MedReddie eyes new markets
Procurement issues are a common grievance for Canadian healthtech companies. AlayaCare CEO Adrian Schauer and Mimosa Diagnostics CEO Dr. Karen Cross argued in a virtual panel discussion in May that Canada’s approach to procurement, which is handled province by province, drives innovation out of the country.
The segmentation of procurement provides MedReddie with multiple opportunities to deploy its solution. The startup already counts the largest GPO in Canada, HealthPRO, as one of its customers, as well as multiple American firms across New York, Pennsylvania, and Maine. LeBlanc explained that MedReddie can help both national GPOs and local sourcing teams.
“It’s a really interesting, multi-layer customer segment for us, because we can tap into all of those groups,” LeBlanc said.
This month, MedReddie raised $1.55 million in equity seed funding, and an additional $500,000 in federal and provincial government grant funding, to support its international expansion in Europe and Mexico.
The round was led by MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund, with participation from the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation (NBIF), BDC’s Thrive Lab, as well as strategic angel investors Charlie Harling and Daniel Doiron.
LeBlanc is now looking forward to going to Brussels next month, where she will showcase MedReddie to prospective customers at the European Value-Based Procurement Conference.
“We built this as a global solution, a web-based solution,” LeBlanc said. “So we’ve been ultra-prepared and ready to merge into those markets.”
Feature image courtesy MedReddie.