Telmediq
Telmediq offers a cloud based unified texting and voice communication solution for care team members at acute care hospitals, ambulatory sites and Integrated Delivery Networks.
RECIPIENT for:
Product of the Year
When – and how – was your company born?
There are some events that change us forever. For Ben Moore, the birth of his daughter in 2010 brought both joy and a series of challenges that had such a profound impact, it led to the creation of Telmediq. Thea Moore was delivered prematurely in an emergency procedure, with both mother and child in hospital for 5 weeks. During that time, Ben witnessed first-hand how cumbersome many of the communications were between hospital staff, clinicians, and family members.
While in hospital, Ben saw that sometimes it was taking up to an hour for doctors and nurses to connect. He wondered why pagers and phone tag were being used instead of modern day technology. He developed relationships with nurses, physicians, and other clinical staff to understand the obstacles in clinical communication and collaboration. Wanting to advocate on behalf of all patients, not just his wife and daughter, Ben started Telmediq in 2011.
Who are some of your clients? What projects are you working on right now, and what do they do?Telmediq services large hospital systems and acute care facilities across the U.S. and Canada, including Hennepin County Medical Center, Greenville Health System, Roper Hospital, Sound Physicians, and Vancouver Coastal Health. What we do is simplify the communication process for these clients, and over time we work with these hospitals to consolidate and integrate other systems to improve the entire care process. For example, at Hennepin, we are currently adding an EHR integration to attach patient details to all communication. At Roper, we are working closely with nurses specifically to ensure they can reach the entire care team instantly, which is vital during an emergency situation when they cannot leave the patient room.
What was a pivotal moment for your company?
This year we won the Category Leader award for Secure Communication by KLAS research. This is a very competitive space and with well entrenched players in the market. To have physicians, nurses, and IT team consider Telmediq as best of bread is a huge honour, that we don’t take lightly. One client states, “Everyone is quickly catching on to Telmediq. Everybody is demanding it and wants it now…Physicians are raving about it.” Our commitment is to continue listening to our users’ needs to ensure communication within hospitals continues to evolve as the needs of patients evolve over the years.
What’s the most important thing you’ve learned along the way?
We have learned that every single hospital comes with its own unique set of technologies, processes, teams, and users. Most of our competitors approach a hospital with a “one size fits all” solution – one that’s bound to fail in these complex environments. Hospital clinicians are busy, they don’t have the time or incentive to learn a whole new way of doing things. We’ve taken the approach of mapping these unique processes, technologies, and user dynamics and instead come in with a familiar – yet improved – way of doing things. By cutting out steps or connecting the dots between systems, we’re able to instantly provide a lot of value to our end users.
What does the future 10 years look like for your company?
Although our journey at Telmediq began with pager replacement and secure communications, our solution has grown to be a comprehensive and integrated platform specifically designed to put the patient at the center of care. With U.S. and Canadian healthcare repositioning reimbursement as tied to patient outcomes, instead of specific procedures, it will be more important than ever to build out our hospitals to support patient-centric care initiatives. Healthcare technology is changing at a rapid pace, we see ourselves continuing to be at the “hub” of all this technology, making sure this steady stream of patient data is actionable at the point of care.
Why Victoria?
All businesses start for personal reasons. Telmediq was founded here in Victoria because that’s where founder Ben Moore lives with his family. Fast forward several years, and many U.S. clients later, Telmediq continues to prioritize Victoria for its head office because it is a hub for technology innovation. It provides us access to a fantastic core group of designers and software engineers and provides us all with a great standard of living. We are proud to be a part of Victoria’s vibrant tech community!