When Audrey Bond thought about launching a seed funding campaign for her burgeoning health-care startup, she decided to hold off until she’d landed her first major customer and had a few more potential clients in the pipeline.
It’s safe to say those boxes have now been checked.
Bond is the founder of Vaultt, a mobile app that stores patients’ medical data and other vital information on a secure platform accessible to family members, caregivers and other professionals such as lawyers.
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For Ginger Bertrand, some of her earliest childhood memories in Ottawa are centred around healthcare. “I grew up across the street from what was originally the General Hospital,” she explains,
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On Monday, Vaultt announced it has signed a partnership with Boehringer Ingelheim, the world’s largest private pharmaceutical company, that will see the Ottawa firm design a “medical care passport” for thousands of Canadians who are part of the German pharma giant’s patient support program.
“It’s transformative,” Bond says of the project, which will compile critical information such as patients’ vaccination records, medical history, prescription lists and emergency contacts in one easily accessible electronic document that can be printed or emailed to health-care workers at the touch of a smartphone.
“This allows (health-care providers) to bring together a more complete medical history that they may not have had before so that they can provide better care for patients.”
Complicated medical histories
Boehringer Ingelheim originally approached Bond and her team last fall to see if they could come up with a way to organize vital health records and other important data for patients suffering from rare lung diseases such as idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.
Bond says these patients are at a higher risk of contracting respiratory infections such as COVID-19. They also tend to have complex medical histories with records scattered across a variety of locations in multiple databases, making it difficult to quickly obtain critical information in an emergency.
Vaultt’s new system aims to bring all that data under one roof in a place where it’s instantly accessible to health-care workers, family members and other caregivers.
While Boehringer Ingelheim paid Vaultt to develop the tool and is buying 3,000 subscriptions for its Canadian customers, the system will be available to all users of the Vaultt app. If all goes well, it’s expected to go live in mid-May.
“We’re hoping to blow them away when this launches.”
Bond says she’s hoping it turns enough heads at Boehringer Ingelheim headquarters that the company will pay to provide the system to patients around the world.
“We’re hoping to blow them away when this launches,” she says, adding her seven-person company is already in talks with Boehringer Ingelheim about other potential partnerships.
“We’re working our butts off to make sure this is just way more than they could ever have dreamed. We’re really thrilled to be working with them.”
Meanwhile, Bond says Vaultt is in discussions with several other potential partners about developing additional features for the app. After finishing second in last year’s inaugural SheBoot pitchfest and landing $50,000 from FedDev Ontario, she’s confident her venture is gaining momentum.
“We’re quite excited about where we’re going,” says the affable Bond, a former photographer who launched Vaultt a few years ago with backing from friends and family.
Her next order of business is to start rolling on another fundraising effort, with the goal of securing $1 million in pre-seed funding.
“I think I’m really fortunate,” Bond says. “Not a lot of startups get to this point.”
