About Vice-Principal ResearchThe Queen's Partnerships and Innovation (QPI) team develops and facilitates partnerships with industry, governments, not-for-profit organizations, and other academic institutions to advance the research enterprise at Queen’s and the commercialization and protection of inventions, and to strengthen the regional innovation ecosystem in Kingston and Eastern Ontario.
QPI also supports the university’s strategic goal to build community partnerships and fully embed Queen’s in the community. With support from external funding, the QPI team offers numerous services, resources, and programs to support entrepreneurs, including those from Queen’s, and to accelerate the growth of startups and small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) within Kingston and Eastern Ontario.
When people think of innovation, they often think of a technology or business model – that’s the intersection where Dr. Shahram Yousefi, a professor in Queen’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, feels like his company, Mesh AI is different from other deep-tech healthcare software companies.
While originally aimed at call and clinic scheduling for physician and resident groups with complex schedules, Mesh AI can also handle some of the most challenging nurse rostering or even entire hospital staff scheduling problems. In a fast-paced environment like a specialty group within a teaching hospital, a platform that can save time and eliminate conflicts and errors can mean a world of difference on the stress of both admins and clinicians as well as the quality of care patients receive.
“We have been able to be innovative with both our business model and our technology,” Dr. Yousefi explains. “It’s not just about the state-of-the-art intelligent algorithms that can solve the most constrained call scheduling problems; it’s also about how we customize and price the product for each healthcare team to ensure fairness, equality, and inclusion across the board. Mesh AI is affordable and accessible to even the most rural healthcare teams with very limited budget while still ensuring equitable and low-conflict schedules for all individual doctors or residents, for example.”
And the approach is working. Mesh AI has seen a 700% growth in product demos since September 2022 and an 80% growth rate in business in the last year.
“Our numbers seem really large right now, but they come as the result of a slow and steady approach,” Dr. Yousefi says. He adds, “we are also very proud that our churn is practically zero; when healthcare teams migrate to Mesh AI, they never leave. And they consistently give us a 5 out of 5 stars in customer support.” Today, workforce shortage is the number one problem in healthcare globally. Overworked and burned out, clinicians are leaving the profession or worse, pass away from suicide.
“In the US alone, two doctors die by suicide each day,” says Dr. Yousefi. Bad staff scheduling also costs patient lives. In the US, each year, more than 500,000 patients die due to medical errors.
“And fatigue is a major driver of medical errors,” according to Dr. Yousefi. This is in fact how Dr. Yousefi, a global expert in telecom and data storage algorithms, found himself in the frontlines of helping our healthcare workers with better shifts. Having personally experienced the pains of manual scheduling for healthcare staff, he began working on the problem in 2014. With his background in optimization algorithms, Dr. Yousefi knew there was a better way to handle medical scheduling than just using emails and spreadsheets. Collaborating with another entrepreneurial-minded professor at Queen’s, Dr. Mohsen Omrani, a medical doctor and neuroscientist, the two set out to co-found Canarmony Corp., a healthcare software company that laid the foundations of what would become Mesh AI and OPTT (a mental health platform), separately.
In 2016, Canarmony was accepted into Queen’s Partnerships and Innovation’s (QPI) (then Office of Partnerships and Innovation) Innovation Park incubator and their GrindSpaceXL program, to develop the concept into a reality. Over the course of the last several years, Dr. Yousefi has been working on the company with a small team in a part-time capacity.
“A lot of startups want to come out of the gate and grow quickly. Yes, ‘time is money,’ but we had a bit of a different thought process,” says Dr. Yousefi. “The slow evolution became a strength. It allowed us to avoid some of the pitfalls of many healthcare software ventures. Instead of building fast for all, and fail to be a good product for anyone, we took the time to learn what matters to the healthcare teams we support in Canada and the US on the long run. That, along with our accumulated expertise in managing change in healthcare, guided us to develop a unique offering today; a product that is both adaptive and affordable for the majority of physician and resident groups in North America.”
Through iterations, data collection and time, Mesh AI has narrowed their product market fit to find the right niche.
“We started close to home and have worked out geographically from there,” says Dr. Yousefi. In addition to adding clients in the US, Mesh AI is now serving physicians and residents at some of the largest hospitals in Canada from coast to coast, including Sick Kids, Toronto General Hospital, Toronto West Hospital, Kingston General Hospital, University of British Columbia, Royal Columbian Hospital, Mount Sinai, Royal Victoria Hospital, Guelph General Hospital, the Ottawa Hospital, Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, and many more well-known hospitals and health networks.
Dr. Yousefi believes Mesh AI’s success in reaching hospitals is in talking directly to the end users. “We determined that spending time speaking with high level administrators who likely won’t use the platform isn’t the best approach for us. Our mission has been to improve wellness for clinicians, and this is where many software companies have failed healthcare. Electronic medical records meant to save healthcare are now a major point of complaint with doctors spending countless hours checking boxes and filling forms and spending less time with patients.”
Conferences and demonstrations have also proved fruitful in developing important partnerships. On October 2022, Mesh AI attended the American Academy of Pediatrics National Conference and Exhibition in Anaheim, California, which has initiated a number of new partnership opportunities.
Dr. Yousefi also received support from QPI’s High-impact Mentorship program, offered via the Health Innovation Kingston (HI YGK) Project to help a selection of health-innovation focused startups get ready for investment. QPI hired serial entrepreneur Leo Lax (Executive Managing Director of L-SPARK) to work with Dr. Yousefi on refining product-market fit and business strategy over a 6-month period. “This program was very impactful for our growth as Leo’s ‘Sherpa’ style of advising quickly removed many uncertainties in our business model as well as product design,” he says.
Additionally, Shahram credits much of their success to word-of-mouth referrals. In fact, one of their recent partnerships with the American Medical Women's Association (AMWA), the largest association of female physicians, came through recommendations by female physicians who believe in the power of Mesh AI to make healthcare a more inclusive place for women physicians.
The company has also had tremendous success with their "Mesh AI Ambassadors" program. Ambassadors are medical students, residents, fellows, physicians, and other healthcare leaders who are interested in working with Mesh AI towards product improvement as well as growth and promotion opportunities.
Looking to the year ahead, Mesh AI is focused on growth of the company and subsequently the team. “We spend most of our time on hiring new staff, improving the product for experience, reliability, and stability, and sales,” says Dr. Yousefi. “In the coming year, we are offering a $1.5 million Canadian investment opportunity in our seed funding campaign via convertible debt, SAFE, or KISS.”
QPI is looking forward to providing continued supports and mentorship for Mesh AI as a virtual Queen’s Startup Runway client.
The Health Innovation (HI YGK) Project is led by the City of Kingston and supported with funding from the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario. The Queen’s Startup Runway is offered through the Scale-Up Platform, an initiative supported by FedDev Ontario and led by Invest Ottawa in Eastern Ontario and in which QPI is a regional partner, and the health-focused High-impact Mentorship Program is offered through the HI YGK Project.