Brightsquid: Increasing the effectiveness of healthcare across Canada and the world
ROHIT JOSHI—scientist, lawyer, tech entrepreneur—always knew he wanted to do something meaningful and important. He’s finally settled on the small task of revolutionizing healthcare.
BOGGED DOWN BY THE FAX
It all began with a 2009 meeting with the then-chief radiologist at the Calgary Children’s Hospital. The doctor had a problem: he wanted to send an infant’s CT scan to five other specialists across North America for advice in interpreting the image readings. To secure the input of his peers, the doctor had to:
Burn the images onto DVDs
Hire couriers to transport those disks all over the continent
Wait a few days for delivery to occur (and remember, this is a sick child waiting for care)
Hope that the recipients could even read the disk in the first place, because a whopping 30% of the time they could not
The issue was not one of technology—by 2009, Dropbox and Google Drive were in wide use in non-medical circles. No, it was a matter of privacy compliance, and the fact that using commercial solutions not designed for healthcare applications did not guarantee the security of patient information.
“That’s where I thought I could add to the discussion,” says Joshi, CEO of healthcare technology company Brightsquid. “Because of my medical and legal background, I felt compelled to fix the problem. All I had to do was figure out the pertinent regulations. So here are some famous last words: How hard could it be?”
Rohit Joshi, CEO of Healthcare, Brightsquid
Eleven years later, Joshi and his teammates at Brightsquid might acknowledge that it was perhaps a little more difficult than it seemed. They put in the hard work of developing Brightsquid Secure-Mail—easy-to-use, compliant, secure email made specifically for the healthcare industry—but the state of the art in medical communication between clinics, doctors, pharmacists, psychologists, dentists, physiotherapists, etc., until very recently remained . . . fax machines. As recently as 2017, Canadian medical clinics sent and received an average of 24,000 pages of faxed information every year.
Modern fax machines store patient information in unsecured hard drives and are a very unreliable technology when lives are at stake. They break, they run out of ink, they experience failed connections, and there’s no way of knowing that printouts get into the right hands in a timely fashion. It’s a risky way to do medicine, but the status quo proved difficult to disrupt—even after fax machines became a cyber security risk to clinics.
SAVING THE DAY
Which brings us to early 2020 and the arrival of the Covid-19 virus that disrupted everything, everywhere, including medicine. Almost overnight, doctors were all working from home. Patients couldn't visit their physicians or specialists at their offices. No one knew how to keep the health system moving safely. At first, it seemed as though video might be the easiest response to the situation, but the fact is that video is time consuming, prone to glitches and usability issues, and can pose privacy concerns. The truth about virtual care is that less than 1% of it is conducted using video services, while secure messaging accounts for more than 80% of remote interactions between physicians and patients.
Brightsquid Secure-Mail offers the secure and privacy-compliant transfer of photos, videos and text between medical professionals and between doctors and their patients. With users in more than 55,000 healthcare clinics in Canada, the USA and the EU, Secure-Mail works on any device, and is easy for new users (including seniors) to learn. All that's required is an email address and an Internet connection.
So: Secure-Mail lays the groundwork for more accurate remote diagnoses, protects sensitive information from being hacked or otherwise falling into the wrong hands, and supports the social distancing that keeps everyone safe during a pandemic while enabling the continuity of care that has been proven to be so beneficial to patient health.
In other words, in 2020 Brightsquid found its moment—one about as meaningful and important as Rohit Joshi could have imagined.
In the midst of the pandemic, Alberta Health contacted Brightsquid to provide a Secure-Mail account for every patient in the province to enable physicians to communicate securely with patients and one another. This is good news for Brightsquid, of course, but Joshi emphasizes that it’s even better news for the rest of us. “We’re truly changing the way healthcare is delivered,” he says. “And not just during this pandemic. Healthcare is going to become more secure, precise and cost-effective.” In other words, better for patients, doctors, administrators and taxpayers.
HATCHING CALGARY’S HEALTH-TECH SECTOR
Making things better is one of the guiding principles behind Brightsquid, and in that spirit the company has recently become the founding organization behind Calgary's Health Technology Commercialization Hub (HATCH), an accelerator (partially funded by the Opportunity Calgary Investment Fund) that empowers healthcare startups in Calgary and across Alberta with access to innovate on Brightsquid’s secure medical communications platform. The platform pre-integrates all privacy, security and compliance regulations and guidelines, enabling health tech startups to get apps to market more quickly and with a greater degree of success. The first cohort (of “hatchlings”) graduates in September 2020.
And here’s where things get really interesting. The apps will be pre-integrated with the Brightsquid system as well as with the TELUS Health Exchange, a national standards-based communication platform that helps clinicians improve care delivery.
Everyone on Secure-Mail, be they a medical provider or a patient, will be able to access any of those first-cohort apps, knowing they meet with the most stringent privacy and security standards in the world. Small Calgary health-tech companies will thus be able to play right away on a massive stage. Projections say that HATCH will help create more than 300 health-tech jobs in Calgary over the next five years and can also attract promising companies to the city.
HATCHLING PROFILE: ENTiD
ENTiD, one of the Calgary health-tech startups in the first cohort of Brightsquid’s HATCH program, is building a diagnostic platform for healthcare professionals that diagnose and treat ear disease. The standard otoscope—the lighted scope, powered by asmall bulb, that doctors use when they look inside your ears—hasn’t changed much since the 1960s. That’s a problem, because fully half of all diagnoses based on their use are wrong.
ENTiD’s digital otoscope technology will let doctors record, store and share high-quality ear images (and potentially other medical images, such as suspected cancers, moles and other things) quickly with specialists and, thanks to the Brightsquid platform, with all required privacy, security and compliance standards in place.
As Joshi observes, “It took our company over $10 million to get to market. To spark tech innovation and growth in this city, we’re going to help ENTiD and the rest of our “hatchlings” get there for a fraction of the cost by putting our compliance and communications platform to work for them.”
ON CALGARY’S “ACCESSIBLE” BUSINESS CULTURE
While the city’s med tech sector is still relatively young, Joshi believes that all the elements are present in Calgary to encourage rapid growth and sustainability, including a resilient entrepreneurial culture and an uncommonly accessible pool of investors, mentors and contacts. "I’ve reached high and never been turned down. In my experience, that’s unique to this city,” says Joshi. “I don’t have to worry about someone’s title or role or influence—if I want to meet with them, they’ll make time.” He notes that most of his connections are not in the medical world, but that Calgarians are genuinely interested in finding a better way to do things, even if it’s not in their own specific fields.
Joshi also speculates that the city’s cyclical boom-and-bust economy has bred a kind of smart creativity that looks down the road, prepares for disruption, and is prepared to turn on a dime if necessary. “There’s a level of optimism here that keeps us going,” he says.
WHAT’S NEXT
Brightsquid is working on supporting patients by helping to connect their entire healthcare team, from their family practitioner through medical specialists, mental health providers, chiropractors, physiotherapists, etc. To support the exchange of patient information across these health providers, Brightsquid is leading an initiative to standardize the communication between these providers and their patients.
The scenario is similar to the agreement by Canadian banks to establish the Interac system, which made it possible for Canadians to conduct secure financial transactions on a single shared network. “We have to create that same revolution for Canadian healthcare systems,” says Joshi, “where the patient can access and share their information with multiple healthcare providers.”
The COVID-19 crisis has exposed weaknesses in the Canadian system. Clinics did not have a way of communicating with patients—they couldn’t send a mass email to tell people what was going on, what new protocols were in place, or even how to make an appointment. Clinic phone systems crashed. 811, Alberta’s 24-hour health information line, crashed. In response, on May 25, 2020, Brightsquid launched their integration into the Alberta My Health Records portal. This enables all Alberta patients to engage in two-way private communication with their health providers, including physicians, dentists, psychologists and others.
Over the next 3-5 years, Brightsquid aims to be the matrix in which Calgary’s healthcare tech innovation takes root. Currently, 70-75% of all the medical practices in Canada rely on software owned by a few large companies. If health-tech apps must be adjudicated for compliance and viability individually, there’s a good chance that innovation will slow. But Brightsquid has the solution: the company has made an agreement with TELUS Health (and, hopefully soon with others) that any company that’s connected through the Brightsquid platforms can access the TELUS Health Exchange under the Brightsquid agreement, without the need for further adjudication. That will help innovators get their products to market as quickly and easily as possible.
"My goal is for Brightsquid to have the definitive “app” store that lets innovators create, knowing they are automatically integrated into major Canadian medical systems.”
A recent Canadian Medical Association/Ipsos survey (August 2019) reveals that 73% of Canadians—across all generations—believe that virtual care will improve and speed access, be more convenient, and result in better overall care. If Brightsquid has anything to do with it, Calgary will be at the centre of this fundamental shift in how healthcare is practiced and delivered across the country—and across the globe.