TracMed may only be a few months old, but the health IT company is already hiring to expand its sales and training team for its new partnership with Burlington’s ABELMed.
“We saw a lot of physicians that are either confused or don’t know what options are available in the market for them,” TracMed president Guna Deivendran told YourMississaugaBiz.com.
The Mississauga business has received a growing number of inquiries for presentations on ABELMed’s new electronic e-record (EMR) system, ABEL-in-a-box.
An EMR system offers physicians a portable computer source that includes up-to-date information of patients’ health records.
Under the partnership agreement, TracMed will handle sales, distribution and technical support for ABEL-in-a-box for the province of Ontario.
TracMed was created after Deivendran and his associates identified a “tremendous opportunity” for EMR systems while working in the Ministry of Health but didn’t want to go through the standard procedures for innovation and gaining government support after starting the new company.
“Creating a software and getting it through the Ontario approval process is going to be a difficult process for someone like us to do from the get go,” Deivendran said, noting ABELMed’s 36 years of experience in the healthcare business. “We saw the business opportunity for someone to come in, explain and help [physicians] transition from paper to paperless. That’s what really pushed us forward.”
In addition to experience, Deivendran said partnering with ABELMed also came with benefits such as being one of the “pioneers” of medical buildings for physicians and pre-existing involvement in the dental market. “I would say ABELMed has it all,” Deivendran said. “And for us as a young company, to partner with someone like that would allow us to grow exponentially.”
TracMed currently has 10 employees, but Deivendran said the company is already looking to bring on more support workers as it takes on more responsibilities from ABELMed. “That’s a good thing but also a business pressure for us,” he said.
Information sessions or installations of the ABEL-in-a-box EMR device have already taken place in Mississauga, other parts of the Greater Toronto Area, St. Catherine’s and Windsor.
“We are reaching out to where we see there are pockets of physicians that have not converted,” Deivendran said, noting the company’s small staff are doing one to two presentations a day. “And we anticipate the number to go up significantly in the next few months.”
While training physicians on how to use ABEL-in-a-box takes about 10-15 hours, Deivendran estimates there are 20,000 of them in Ontario alone, a huge market for his partnership product. “We’ll try to convert as many people as we can,” he said.
Karen K. Ho 