2017 Grad co-founds healthcare start-up

The first thing you see when you go to the website of Hypercare, the start-up co-founded by Faculty of Information alumnus Albert Tai, is its sales pitch to health care administrators: “No more pagers. No more phone tag.”

Tai says people who don’t work in the healthcare sector are often stunned to find out that the old-fashioned pager remains ubiquitous in hospitals. “There’s a joke about it,” he says. “It used to be only doctors and drug dealers using pagers. Now it’s just doctors.”

According to Tai, the omnipresent pager is but one symptom of the healthcare sector’s serious malaise. Other symptoms include the ongoing use of fax machines and dependency on old-fashioned call centres within the hospital to track down doctors on call. “Everyone knows healthcare is lagging usually 10 or 15 years behind every other industry,” says Tai, who completed his Bachelor’s in computer science and medical science before enrolling at the Faculty of Information in 2015.

The co-founders of Hypercare: CTO Umar Azhar, CEO and Faculty of Information grad Albert Tai, and COO and emergency physician doctor, Joseph Choi. They aim to make it possible for doctors to finally ditch their pagers and fax machines.

Obstacles to innovation in health care include the sector’s complexity, its aversion to risk, the high regulatory burden placed on it, and the built-in disincentives to economic efficiency that exist in a publicly funded system. An example of the latter, says Tai, is that administrators who find a way to save money will often have it taken away from the budget the following year, as opposed to redirected to their other funding needs.

On the bright side, the fact that there are still so many problems to be solved provides opportunity, he says. “It’s one of the last industries where you don’t have to be very creative because there are still so many problems…every single way it’s done now is terrible.”

Tai, who has two phones and a laptop on the go during our meeting, was bewildered to see doctors using even more devices – sometimes as many as five different pagers he says. He learned that when they improvised solutions to get around the pager system – using WhatsApp for group chats, for example – it raised privacy concerns and patient confidentiality issues.

The project that eventually became Hypercare began in a computer course Tai took as part of his Master of Information degree in Information Systems and Design. Students were tasked with coming up with an idea to solve a problem in the health care sector, and then developing a business plan and prototype.

Tai’s team was connected to three physician mentors. Robert Wu, the site director of general internal medicine at Toronto’s University Health Network (UHN), really helped them understand the problem from the administrative end, says Tai, while doctors Allan Martin and Matt Strickland explained the pain points from their perspective as front-end providers. “We quickly realized that, along with WhatsApp not having the security or privacy features required in healthcare, it also didn’t address the bigger problem of connecting with other providers outside of your team to provide collaborative care.”

The Hypercare team outside their workplace in downtown Toronto. UofT provides office space to Hypercare and other start-ups in a converted church.

As he completed his degree and then after he graduated in 2017, Tai remained committed to finding a way to solve the pager problem. He teamed up with Dr. Joseph Choi, who is now Hypercare’s chief operating officer as well as an emergency physician at UHN and an Assistant Professor in UofT’s Department of Medicine, to co-found Hypercare. Tai devoted himself to the start-up full time, using the funds from small grants, including one for $37,000 from the Ontario Centres of Excellence, to bring on some part-time employees.

Later, the start-up, which now has seven full-timers and two part-timers, was given space at UofT, in a start-up incubator in a converted church. The UofT Early Stage Technology (UTEST) program provided helpful mentoring advice.  Tai also credits the “system-level perspective” he acquired at the Faculty of Information for helping him run Hypercare.

When money was at its tightest, Tai had to occasionally sleep in the office, but the pressure eased when Hypercare landed half a million in funding from angel investors in the U.S. in 2018. Then, in February of 2019, the start-up won its first paid customer – the Ophthalmology Department at Queen’s University. Not long after Hypercare closed its first hospital-wide deal with the Michael Garron Hospital, formerly known as Toronto East General.

Given the magnitude of the hospital pager problem, Tai was not surprised to learn early on that there had already been attempts at trying to solve it. American companies like Vocera and Spok complemented existing pager systems with their own apps, but they faced low adoption from clinicians as the early implementations were often fraught with problems, says Tai. In many cases, hospitals layered the new technology on top of the old, using multiple software systems and devices. While the biggest of the companies have hundreds of millions in revenues, there hasn’t really been a dominant player to emerge in the field.

Hypercare aspires to be the single solution. Users will know instantly who the on-call doctors and specialists are without having to call the hospital switchboard, arrange a page, and play telephone tag. The software incorporates corporate directory and shift information. Hypercare’s goal is to allow the phasing out of pagers, fax machines and even email.

Tai says things really started to pick up for the nascent company when Hypercare began to integrate hospitals’ on-call schedules into their proposed software solution. “Now we have a comprehensive solution. That’s what’s been exciting the hospitals,” says Tai. “It’s all real time. The switchboard operator can use it and clinicians can also use it without calling the switchboard.” What’s more, unlike the current practice at many hospitals, when scheduling changes are made, everyone will be aware of them.

Hypercare was one of three companies to pitch to the Michael Garron Hospital. Based on that and positive word of mouth from local doctors, it was chosen to do a small pilot which proved a success. That led to an enterprise-wide adoption of the platform, which is expected to be widely deployed in the coming months.

Hypercare is also running in seven healthcare organizations in the Kitchener and Cambridge municipalities in southern Ontario. Craig Albrecht – a family physician who leads the Cambridge Interprofessional Care  team, a multidisciplinary group of doctors, nurses, social workers and outreach workers who provide community care and services – says they deal with a relatively high concentration of patients suffering from poverty, housing insecurity, substance use disorders and mental health issues. “We have a lot of people who are always on the move and can disappear for weeks or months at a time,” he explains. “This makes coordinating services and providing care for them in the usual way very difficult.” Transitioning to Hypercare has made coordinating with both his team and other external teams much simpler, says Tai.

Hypercare hopes to win additional   hospital-wide contracts as its credibility increases.  While his parents wanted him to be a doctor or pharmacist, Tai’s passion was always technology. He says he has no interest in a profitable “exit” or sale from the company he co-founded.  Instead, he aspires to be the “Microsoft of healthcare,” systematically replacing inefficient hospital software with better products and systems. “The work is very motivating,” says Tai, “because the clinicians are smart, passionate, and there for the right reasons – to make patient care better.”

Update April 27, 2020: Read more about how Hypercare responded to the COVID-19 crisis.

Update July 21, 2020: The Ontario Bioscience Innovation Organization named Hypercare one of the projects that will be part of its Early Adopter Health Network.