It is no secret that Canada’s health-care system is beset by significant problems: long wait times to access emergency care, a shortage of family doctors, and physicians overburdened by administrative work, to name some oft-cited concerns.
In 2019, Canadian Blake Adams launched Medimap, a company that aims to address some of these problems with its technologies.
At its founding, the company helped residents in Victoria, B.C. find walk-in appointments at local clinics. Today, Canadians across the country can use Medimap for a range of services, including identifying which nearby clinics have the lowest wait times, matching with family physicians, and finding alternatives to emergency room care.
Canadian Affairs reporter Hadassah Alencar spoke with Thomas Jankowski, Medimap’s CEO, about the company’s services and business model, who it works with, and its recent partnerships with tech giants Amazon Web Services and Nvidia.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
HA: When did you join Medimap and who does it serve?
TJ: About three years ago, I took over from founder Blake Adams when he left to pursue other endeavours.
Right now we serve not just the walk-in clinic space, but also family practices, nurses, pharmacies, hospitals and all of the disciplines within “allied health” — which is like physiotherapy, massage therapy, chiropractic care, mental health specialists.
We are now across all of Canada and hopefully expanding beyond Canada soon as well. We have been used by more than 12 million uniquely identified individuals as well as health care practices and hospital management.
HA: What can a patient use Medimap for?
TJ: There are two main ways patients can interact with the website right now.
One is very episodic: someone who says, ‘I need health care right now.’ You can go on Medimap, do a search for what your symptoms might be, put in your postal code, and get a list of clinics. … We are the only [company] in Canada that has access to these wait times that we collect through proprietary means.
Our second key means of interaction is “allied health.” What we really focus on is last-minute, empty windows of availability.
So a chiropractor, for example, might have their own schedules filled to about 70 or 80 per cent capacity, but they will always have these extra windows of time. Medimap gives a patient the option to book last-minute appointments yourself, so you’re not calling 20 different chiropractor places if you threw out your back.
HA: How does Medimap’s patient-doctor matching program work?
TJ: Canadians who do not have family doctors can sign up for our patient-family doctor matching program, in which we try to be about 10 times faster in matching you with someone than our provincial counterparts.
Right now across Canada the average wait time for a provincial match is about two-and-a-half years. The longest wait time now stands at six years.
We don’t try to compete against these provincial programs. I think every Canadian that doesn’t have a family doctor should be on these provincial-led programs first and foremost. But we try to make that connection a lot faster.
HA: What is Medimap’s business model?
TJ: The pricing model for patients is generally free. Patients can use Medimap as their way of finding clinics, booking appointments for free.
For the doctor patient-matching program, it is a paid program right now because of how labour intensive that program is on the backend. That costs patients about $100 a year. But a patient is likely to get matched within the year.
For clinics, we charge [them to be listed in the app], anywhere between $50 and $300 a month.
HA: Is it easy for businesses to be a part of Medimap?
TJ: A lot of companies in the health-care technology space offer up their own APIs [programming interfaces] and expect the partner to connect to them. We realize that a lot of the partners in this ecosystem are actually not very capable in that regard, or it’s costly for them to do so. The last thing we want to do is to add to the administrative burden of connecting to us.
So we flipped the equation. We said, ‘Tell us how you’d like us to connect to you, and we’ll make it work.’
HA: In what ways does Medimap use AI to reduce ER wait times?
TJ: One product we are now offering provincial governments and hospitals is trying to, I guess, load balance the system better, by moving people away from the hospitals’ emergency rooms if they don’t really have to be there.
And it’s a tricky thing to establish, because it’s sort of built into the Canadian mentality that if you’re ailing, go to the nearest ER … people go to ERs in Canada a lot more than they do in other Western countries.
We’ve developed a system that basically aggregates wait times from all of the surrounding areas and specifically offers different solutions based on your acuity level.
HA: Does Medimap help to reduce doctors’ administrative work?
TJ: It really depends on the size of the practice.
For the smallest practices — typically one doctor and one medical assistant — we’re seeing them save between seven to 15 hours a week [by reducing the time they spend on tasks such as booking patients, marketing their practices, managing their websites].
But it really depends on where they’re based. A practice that’s in a [small town] will see fewer savings than a busy practice in downtown Toronto or Vancouver.
HA: Tell me about how Medimap is being supported by Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Health Equity Initiative and Nvidia’s Inception Program?
TJ: The AWS Health Equity Initiative is a program that recognizes companies that are making health care fundamentally more equitable.
Nvidia is a lot more focused on the technical aspect of what we’re trying to build. They think there is a need for a lot of these tools in health-care practices in Canada, but also outside of the country.
It’s incredible to see these US-based, global entities interested in what Medimap is building and trying to help [by providing funding and helping us develop our tools]. It’s a really important piece of recognition for us.
