Finding a global market for physician scheduling technology

A Quebec City company that makes ground‑breaking web tools for hospitals to schedule doctors and manage patient appointments has found a market for its technology in France, through the help of the Canadian Trade Commissioner Service (TCS).

PetalMD, which has a vast market of health care authorities across Canada using its cloud‑based systems to deal with their complex physician management needs, is finding that many of the same challenges affect customers for its products abroad, says Marie‑Claude Messier, the company’s vice‑president of business development.

With the assistance of the TCS and provincial trade programs in Quebec, PetalMD has signed up two hospitals in France and another in Belgium, and it is talking to more potential customers in Europe and beyond.

“The TCS helps us reach decision‑makers,” says Messier, noting that health systems in countries are all “quite different”, so it’s important to get to the right people and get the word out about PetalMD’s unique products. “Trade commissioners do have a lot of great contacts.”

The company was started in 2009 to respond to a critical need for software solutions to align physician scheduling with patient demand. Most hospitals, clinics and health regions still rely on paper‑based systems for the task, Messier says, noting that it can take 50 to 100 hours every one to three months to manually draw up and publish their schedules. These quickly get out‑of‑date, for example if a doctor is suddenly called away for an emergency or a personal reason.

“It’s a nightmare understanding all the constraints; there can be professional ones, legal ones and administrative ones linked to hospitals, and physicians have their own constraints, because they work everywhere and have many commitments and obligations,” she says. Some hospitals as well as “geeks in physician teams” try to amend standard calendar systems like Outlook into custom tools, but these can be complex to use.

PetalMD’s technology “creates the schedule,” Messier says, allowing all kinds of factors to be incorporated into the program by departmental planners, who can then produce a physician timetable in just a few clicks. Doctors who suddenly have conflicts can replace themselves on a peer‑to‑peer basis. PetalMD offer a complementary application to allow patients to book their own appointments directly online. PetalMD is the only vendor offering physicians scheduling and patient booking.

“We are creating the schedule to ensure 24‑7 coverage in all hospital departments,” she explains, noting that once the schedule is created or changed, all qualified staff within the hospital or health region have access to the information. “Everyone knows who’s working, everyone knows who’s on call.”

PetalMD’s schedule management tools are deployed in 1,400 departments in hospitals and regional health authorities across Canada, with a total of 37,000 users in 150 hospitals.

Looking abroad, PetalMD’s first task was to validate the need for the technology elsewhere in the world, which Messier says was accomplished in a series of outreach exercises in Europe, such as a federal‑provincial trade mission to France in 2017. “We can confirm that European customers have the same challenges at managing physicians’ schedules, changes and on‑call needs,” she says.

Héloïse Côté, a trade commissioner in Montreal whose responsibilities include the life sciences sector, connected Messier in June 2017 to Emilie Delestrade, the trade commissioner who assists Canadian companies in the sector with their export efforts in France. The TCS Paris team introduced the company to potential buyers in public and private hospitals and purchasing groups, arranged meetings in France, gave PetalMD visibility on social media and involved the company in a joint mission of French and Belgium buyers to Montreal, in collaboration with Quebec trade officials.

It also identified business opportunities and calls for tenders, such as one at Le Vinatier Hospital Center, a large psychiatric facility in Bron, a city near Lyon. The hospital was finding that scheduling 220 physicians took more than 35 hours, Messier says. PetalMD’s solution, which was implemented in just 18 days in December 2017, has cut the task to a few minutes, saving the facility money and simplifying its systems.

“For our hospital, the PetalMD solution is a breath of fresh air,” says Florence Grellet, director of medical affairs and research at Le Vinatier, noting that the system allows doctors to exchange information autonomously and “eliminates the risk of human errors linked to the manual entry of data.”

Côté has helped PetalMD on a number of fronts, such as connecting it to TCS experts related to EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. “I have to be the eyes and ears of companies regarding any information, intelligence or activities they could be interested in, based on their needs expressed and technology offered,” she says.

Emilie Delestrade, Sandrine Caduc and Stephanie Robin, trade commissioners in Paris and Brussels covering the science and innovation sector, have helped PetalMD understand the structure, constraints and technologies in the French and Belgian health‑care systems.

“PetalMD’s on‑call dashboard and physician scheduling tool are a true innovation, answering an important need in France,” says Delestrade. “With their growing experience of the local market, the company has developed a fine-tuned strategy.”

The fact that PetalMD’s solution is hosted on Microsoft’s AZUR platform and it has a strategic partnership with Microsoft has also helped with marketing. PetalMD is among a handful of health vendors in Canada that Microsoft promotes internationally, for example featuring the company in webinars and at the huge Paris Healthcare Week held each spring.

Looking internationally for customers is challenging, says Messier. Sales cycles are long, so to already have two customers in France and one in Belgium in the past year is “unusually fast,” she comments.

The TCS has been invaluable in the process, for example accompanying PetalMD in meetings with prospective customers, Messier adds. “If the trade commissioner comes with us, that’s ideal. When they introduce us, the door is wide open.”

Other international markets that the company is looking at include the UK, Switzerland, the United States and South Africa.