The Globe and Mail: How Toronto’s PocketHealth learned to sell technology to cash-strapped Canadian hospitals

A feature article in the Globe and Mail highlights how PocketHealth has helped patients and healthcare providers find a better way to access and share their medical images, in the process gaining significant market share in a space that is often challenging for technology companies to gain traction.

An excerpt:

“Canada’s publicly funded health care system is a notoriously frustrating market for domestic medical technology vendors to crack. Many complain they can’t land a sale in their own backyard because of stingy, risk-averse buyers, despite success abroad. It’s a problem that has surfaced in several government reports and that no one seems able to solve.

But for Toronto’s PocketHealth Inc., it’s a different story. The six-year-old startup, whose software enables patients to receive digital medical images from health care providers over the internet, has been installed by 400 health care centres in Canada – and nearly 90 per cent of imaging providers and hospitals in Ontario, including Toronto’s University Health Network and William Osler Health System and McMaster Children’s Hospital in Hamilton.

They not only did so willingly, they’ve also spread the word to others who have since adopted it. “It was a no-brainer for us,” said Mike Sharma, director of diagnostics with Niagara Health, which brought PocketHealth to his employer’s five centres after adopting it at previous employer North York General Hospital. “They banged on the doors, got in, then through word of mouth it reverberated throughout our community.”

Now, after establishing a toehold south of the border, too, including in five California centres operated by giant Universal Health Services, PocketHealth has raised $20-million in venture capital. The funding was led by U.S. growth equity firm Questa Capital and backed by past investor Radical Ventures. “They’ve made a very slick, efficient consumer-friendly platform and figured out the right way and value proposition to sell it,” said Questa’s Washington-based managing partner Ryan Drant.”

Read the full story here.