Blog post by Tabassum Pasha
WaiveTheWait: Creating AI Administrators for Clinics
By Tabassum Pasha
Introduction
WaiveTheWait reduces the administrative burden by automating the tedious tasks in Canada’s top EMR systems, labeling the 100s of faxes clinics receive daily with no staff intervention, and enabling patients to check in for medical appointments before leaving home.
WaiveTheWait is enabling clinics across Canada to mitigate patient backlogs, provider burnout, and staff shortages, issues that currently plague our healthcare system and are exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Their products solve a real pain point for medical facilities struggling to meet patient demand and need to communicate with patients quickly and efficiently. By automating routine EMR tasks, labeling faxes, and running a virtual waiting room, providers and staff have more time to focus on patient care.
WaiveTheWait was founded in 2020 by Shreyansh Anand (external link) (Co-Founder and CEO), and Tabassum Pasha (external link) (Co-Founder and COO) joined the team in 2021.
Market
The Opportunity
The global digital health market (Total Addressable Market) was valued at USD 211B in 2022 (external link) and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 18.6% from 2023–2030. Specifically in Canada, the digital health market was worth USD 2.5B in 2022 (external link) and is projected to rise at a CAGR of 9.6% between 2022–2027. While the digital health market in Canada is relatively small, the average Canadian visits a physician seven times a year (external link) . With this in mind, there’s a Serviceable Obtainable Market of USD 557M per year that WaivetheWait aims to take, calculated based on the number of physician, dentist, and optometrist visits that the average Canadian makes.
Current Solutions
Traditionally, managing EMRs and patient appointments has mainly been a manual function in clinics. For example, an average healthcare staff member has to take 53 phone calls per day per doctor (external link) , illustrating that healthcare remains a high-touch yet inefficient industry.
The pandemic severely exposed how broken the healthcare system is, as primary care clinics and hospitals routinely face enormous backlogs (external link) , many doctors and healthcare staff are experiencing record levels of burnout (external link) , and healthcare facilities are encountering an alarming labor shortage (external link) . Due to this immense strain, staff routinely face an uphill battle managing increasingly complex tasks with dwindling resources. Ultimately, patients suffer the most as wait times skyrocket and the quality of life decreases.
This market is ripe for disruption as it’s unsustainable to maintain the status quo, and it can benefit significantly from automation tools that eliminate the menial, time-consuming tasks that staff does to communicate with patients. This is where WaiveTheWait comes into the picture.
Product
WaiveTheWait is currently composed of the Automated Task Manager, Document Triaging Service, and Smart Waiting Room. They work in tandem to simplify routine tasks and automate the patient communication process, thus making make it painless for doctors and clinics to triage and follow up with patients.
The Automated Task Manager automates complex and everyday EMR tasks such as patient follow-up, document sending, and preventative care. The system works in the background and uses NLP to scan through tasks, identify the ones that need to be done, and automatically complete them to a clinic’s specifications. The Automated Task Manager handles tedious and time-consuming tasks so that clinic staff doesn’t have to.
The Document Triage Service automatically labels the 100s of faxes that clinics receive daily. The system in the background uses various Deep Learning techniques to scan unassigned and unstructured documents and automatically identify the patient name, ordering doctor, document type, and any secondary labels associated with the document.
The Smart Waiting Room streamlines the pre-appointment process for clinics before patients even arrive. Patients fill out a sign-in form and provide any necessary information through WaiveTheWait’s customized dashboard (no downloads or apps required), automatically updating the clinic’s EMR. Patients also receive text reminders and notifications telling them exactly when to leave home to arrive for their appointment, which takes into account regular traffic and clinic delays.
Regarding patient data and privacy, WaiveTheWait is PHIPA compliant, all patient data is deleted after 24 hours, and their servers and databases are all located in Canada. You can see a product demo here (external link) .
Finally, we’re excited that WaiveTheWait is onboarding diagnostic imaging and dentistry clinics alongside medical ones, offering a unique edge above competitors. This diversification stands out because they can continue to expand their market size into other healthcare professions (e.g. pharmacy, optometry, physiotherapy), whereas the competitors mainly target medical clinics and hospitals. In the future, WaiveTheWait can also pursue opportunities with hospitals and larger health systems with more lucrative contracts than they currently have.
Today, WaiveTheWait works with Canada’s top EMR software, such as Dentrix (external link) , SIMMS (external link) , OSCAR (external link) , Accuro (external link) , and Juno (external link) .
Team
Shreyansh Anand (external link) (Co-Founder and CEO): Queen’s University — Master of Computing, specializing in Biomedical Computing (2023). Shreyansh, or Shrey for short, founded WaiveTheWait in May 2020 and joined Next 36 in 2021 (external link) to scale the company. Shreyansh was also featured in Global News (external link) and Queen’s University (external link) and has five years of experience in app and web development.
Tabassum Pasha (external link) (Co-Founder and COO): Smith School of Business at Queen’s University — Bachelor of Commerce (2021) and Queen’s University — Bachelor of Science in Biology (2022). Tabassum joined WaiveTheWait in May 2021 and previously worked in business development roles at IBM, DHL, and Loblaw.
WaiveTheWait in Brampton
Both founders grew up in the GTA and have received immense support from the community. Their first two pilot clinics in Brampton have remained active innovation partners. WaiveTheWait is expanding rapidly in Ontario and British Columbia and is dedicated to increasing access to healthcare, eliminating the pain points for patients while improving the mental health of providers and staff.
In the near future
WaiveTheWait is expanding across Canada this year, focusing on family medicine practices and specialists to become a vital service in their clinical operations. The team has received interest from the US and will expand to the New England region in 2024, offering their products on a broader scale, from primary care clinics to hospitals.