Announcing OnCall’s Seed Funding
Two years ago, we set out to make an easy and secure way for healthcare providers in Canada to start offering video appointments to their patients. It was a pretty simple, clinically-validated concept — yet one that the vast majority of clinicians had yet to adopt.
We realized fairly quickly that the idea of equipping healthcare providers with the ability to see their own patients from anywhere presented a greater opportunity to rejig a big part of the way patients access their healthcare providers and records.
The new vision was to give patients a way to interact with the healthcare providers they know and trust in whatever way they prefer: video, text, phone (audio only), or in person. There are great use cases for each of those communication methods. Making it work really came down to whether we could ensure the privacy of our users, and how well we could overcome the biggest competitor in all healthcare innovation — status quo.
OnCall is definitely not the first company to try to make an impact in this space, but we’ve found success by informing all of our product decisions with a tremendous amount of customer input, and by focusing on the specialties within healthcare where this kind of technology can be best utilized. We are focused on working with mental health clinicians, but it has been amazing to see how many other types of healthcare providers are able to leverage our technology.
I’m thrilled to announce that we’re bringing on Ripple Ventures as our lead investor. Ripple has a strong track record of funding companies that bring a new approach to large, complex, or high growth industries. It’s an honour to be in Ripple’s portfolio.
We see “virtual care” or telehealth being a component of every healthcare provider’s toolkit in the future. To make that vision a reality, we are investing heavily in our technology and human resources this year. One day soon, I hope to see healthcare providers using OnCall to run their entire practice, and more large healthcare enterprises in the private sector leveraging OnCall to launch and run successful virtual care programs.
The healthcare practice of the future is accessible anywhere. Let’s make it happen. If you are interested in learning more about OnCall, please get in touch.
