Tell us a bit about you and your venture! What was your inspiration for creating your venture?
I’m currently a medical student at the University of Toronto that is passionate about entrepreneurship and technology in medicine. My driving thesis is that the business side of medicine provides a powerful approach to tackle our healthcare system’s largest problems, from the aging population to the higher burden of chronic disease. I’ve worked with both health startups and consulting firms to build up my business skillset, and have been fascinated by countless physician-entrepreneurs that have merged clinical practice with innovation. This inspired me to apply to the Next 36, where I was able to push the boundaries of what it meant to be a medical professional by launching my first ever healthcare startup. In creating my venture, I wanted to use my experience as a medical professional to positively impact more than just the patients I was seeing in the clinic.
What problem is your venture solving? Why did you choose to tackle this market?
The problem we’re tackling is simple yet complex: Canada’s healthcare system confuses patients. There is ample support while a patient is in the hospital system, but massive gaps in the community. Patients and caregivers are left anxious and stressed as they self-manage their care in the community. Health navigators are the solution, working individually with patients to guide them through the system while providing emotional support and advocating for the best care with the care team. However, health navigation is massively underutilized in Canada, with patients unaware that the service exists, and potential navigators (like retired nurses) unaware of this career path. Current navigators find it difficult to keep up with the administrative burden of running a private navigation service, while patients that use navigators often pay up-to $150/hour out of pocket. This unfortunately prices out patients that need navigation the most.
Our project (SanuSens) increases access to navigation services for both patients and navigators by better allowing patients to discover and connect to navigators, and by supporting potential navigators in acquiring and serving patients. We reduce the cost of navigation by automating key administrative tasks, and build our platform to capture important health outcomes that can help us predict what works for patients.
At SanuSens, we believe that every patient deserves a health advocate that is willing to go the extra mile for them.
When you first started, what were your biggest hurdles in building your venture?
Coming into the program without a team or a concrete idea was tough. As someone with little business experience, it seemed like everyone around me knew exactly what they were doing. From day one, I felt like the odds were stacked against me. This mentality of thinking that I didn’t have enough resources to succeed was and remains the biggest hurdle in building my venture. In fact, I learned through the Next 36 that this is the biggest hurdle that most entrepreneurs face. The antidote, as we were taught by Reza Satchu, Co-Founder of the Next 36, was “the relentless pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled”. At it’s core, triumphing over this hurdle involved a mindset shift from fearing insufficiency to embracing and pushing through it. Realizing that we were never going to have enough capital, a big enough team, or the perfect market opportunity is freeing. It allows you to focus on pushing through, which is, in and of itself, a fundamental condition for success.
How do you believe technology will impact your industry over the next decade?
There will always be an insatiable, yet unfocused, demand for healthcare: we’re always going to get sick, yet we’re never going to know what type of healthcare we need until we’re sick. This presents a massive opportunity for leveraging predictive technology to better define and predict this demand for healthcare. With enough population health outcomes data, we can start to anticipate how patients will move through the healthcare system — what they’re likely going to need next, and what the most efficient way of getting there will be. We can start to predictively navigate patients. Systemically, this allows us to map out health burden and allocate our scarce resources accordingly. The key to realizing this reality, however, will be the health outcomes data. One of our priorities at SanuSens is to build out our platform from the start to focus on capturing health outcomes, so that we can start using predictive technology to optimize how patients are navigating the healthcare system.
What piece of advice would you give to someone who wants to start a company in your industry?
Canadian healthcare is a tough industry to innovate in. From multiple stakeholders spanning public and private industries to the unique nature of healthcare as a necessary good, our healthcare system is complex and confusing. As a medical student, it took almost a year of focused digging to even begin to understand this — yet, we expect our patients to start to self-navigate weeks after a diagnosis of a chronic disease. Appreciating and acknowledging this complexity is the most important piece of advice I can give to aspiring healthcare entrepreneurs. It’s tempting to underestimate the complexity in this ecosystem for the sake of getting your business off the ground faster — you want to believe that you can sell to that hospital in under a year, or that you can convince patients to pay significantly out of pocket. But this is a common pitfall that I’ve seen time and time again with Canadian healthcare startups. More so in healthcare than most other industries, you need to take your time to understand the space you’re playing in.
What would you say are the most important skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur?
Definitely the willingness to suspend disbelief. We get bogged down by what we don’t have — the perfect information, enough capital, the right idea — and this prevents us from taking action. A successful entrepreneur is comfortable in uncertainty. A successful entrepreneur realizes that they will never have enough of what they need to make the opportunity the “perfect” one. So the only option left is to suspend whatever disbelief you have in your venture or team or self, and to go for it as hard and as fast as you can.
What has been your most valuable lesson during your time in Next 36?
The most valuable lesson I learned during the Next 36 was simple: success is all in your mindset. The Next 36 is an intense, yet truly one-of-a kind experience, which pushes both your professional and personal limits. Buying into the philosophy that you will be building the next big business requires you to fight your tendency to be a skeptic. Yes, most will not succeed big, but those that do almost always have suspended their disbelief. I struggled greatly with this simple lesson, never failing to poke holes in ideas and suggestions. This led to a culture of second-guessing in the team, which slowed us down in the beginning and made it that much harder to execute. As we started to identify and call out these thoughts, we agreed to intentionally suspend disbelief and just try things out. We were amazed at the speed by which we were able to move — by simply experimenting, we were able to quickly determine, with real world data, whether or not our ideas were feasible. Given the massive uncertainty in most of our ideas, this is almost impossible to do in your head. You just have to try it out and see what happens!
Who is one person that has tremendously helped you through your time in Next 36? How did they help you?
Our team mentor, Cindy Fagen. Currently the COO of SAP Labs Canada, Cindy acted as our mentor for the duration of the program (and beyond!). Her role was to help us in whatever way we needed her, and this involved usually meeting once a week to discuss our most pressing issues. While Cindy’s primary expertise wasn’t healthcare, she helped us in a much more profound way. A successful entrepreneur herself, she was our confidant during the many existential crises that all entrepreneurs are bound to face. She normalized the process of what our team was going through — she was there during our downs, our pivots, and when we split with up with one of our team members. Through her coaching and mentorship, we grew not only as entrepreneurs, but as people, who were more self-aware of weaknesses and strengths, and of how we worked as a team.
