Cara LeBlanc knows a thing or two about purchasing headaches.
Immediately after graduating, LeBlanc worked for over a decade securing multi-million dollar healthcare contracts both in Canada and abroad. She says those were the days of Excel spreadsheets, brochures and disorganized board meetings. That's why in 2020 she founded With Reddy from Saint John, Nebraska: to speed up and simplify the healthcare procurement process.
The company currently has five employees, three of whom are based in Waterloo, Ontario, and earlier this month received just over $2 million in funding to go global.
Replacing hospital equipment is “a very important decision and one we have to make from the beginning.”
MedReddie's platform provides procurement teams with a centralized list of suppliers, as well as relevant regulatory, clinical and performance metrics, so they can evaluate medical technologies faster. LeBlanc explained in an interview with BetaKit that she will be joining group purchasing organizations (GPOs) and hospital teams as they experience “information overload” learning about all the possible products and services for their needs from brochures.
MedReddie provides this information in a “more structured way” by collecting publicly available information and allowing providers to control their MedReddie page as if it were a LinkedIn profile. LeBlanc recalled that members of the purchasing committee might be completely unaware of the new features because they were so used to their old equipment.
“If you didn't have that kind of evaluation criteria to make a decision that you thought was critical to the care of your patients over the next decade, that's a very important decision that we need to make from the beginning,” she said.
LeBlanc said MedReddie also helps significantly reduce the time it takes to create source documents such as requests for proposals (RFPs) from months to minutes, while actually addressing different hospital needs. LeBlanc explained that the terms and conditions often remain the same, but the requirements and criteria for evaluating suppliers are unique to each circumstance.
“The tools are not there, and people are just referring to … an old request for proposals that they did years ago, which is no longer relevant because the technology has completely changed,” LeBlanc said. “When I was going to build this company… I wanted to make sure that all the requirements and everything [sourcing documentation] everything is completely new.”
CONNECTED: Armed with C$782,000 in pre-seed funding, MedReddie is looking at new markets.
Procurement issues are general complaint for Canadian healthcare companies. AlayaCare CEO Adrian Schauer and Mimosa Diagnostics CEO Dr. Karen Cross said during a virtual panel discussion in May that Canadian approach to procurementwhich is carried out from province to province, crowds out innovation from the country.
Purchasing segmentation provides MedReddie with many opportunities to implement its solution. The startup's clients already include Canada's largest GPO, HealthPRO, as well as several US firms in New York, Pennsylvania and Maine. LeBlanc explained that MedReddie can help both national attorneys general and local procurement teams.
“This is a really interesting, multi-layered customer segment for us because we can reach all of these groups,” LeBlanc said.
This month, MedReddie raised $1.55 million in seed funding and another $500,000 in federal and provincial government grants to support its international expansion in Europe and Mexico.
The round was led by the MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund with participation from the New Brunswick Innovation Fund (NBIF), Thrive Lab BDC, and strategic angel investors Charlie Harling and Daniel Doiron.
LeBlanc is now looking forward to traveling to Brussels next month, where she will introduce MedReddie to potential clients at a trade show European Conference on Value-Based Purchasing.
“We built this as a global solution, a web solution,” LeBlanc said. “So we were very prepared and ready to enter these markets.”
Image courtesy of MedReddie.
