How WOSLER Is Revolutionizing Medical Imaging: Henry Madubuobi on Winning $100k at StartupFest
Winning the $100,000 Investment prize at StartUpFest came as a shock to Henry Madubuobi, Medical doctor and Co-founder of WOSLER Corp. Wosler, provides top-tier health-care services ranging from Diagnostic Imaging to Pain Management solutions. We sat down with Henry to share his experience winning and building the future of Tele-operated healthcare.
How was your experience winning the $100K Black Entrepreneur Investment Prize at StartupFest?
I mean first of all I think without Tomi, there's definitely no winning. I mean, I didn't know about the event. She orchestrated the entire thing, I'm like, okay, I'm definitely going to be there. But then I started looking into it. And there's one investor that I thought would be very interested in what we're doing. And then that became a motivating factor to go…I was just expecting to make a connection with that investor…that was the only goal in my opinion. We went there and I definitely connected with the investor but then I still didn't expect to win.
In fact, I deliberately delayed when I went to pitch until the investor showed up. I think Tomi remembers this. And she was like, what happened to your pitch? I'm like, he's not there yet.
So eventually, we pitched and after the pitch, I thought it was good because they asked interesting questions, which usually indicates interest. But I didn't receive any email when they announced the top 10. I was also perfectly okay with that. So, we were just chilling, and we decided to just use that opportunity to just walk around and have dinner. It was the last night of the conference. So we went out, and it was, I believe, late in the evening, probably around 11 p.m., that we received a call saying, hey, ‘Where are you guys? Where is Henry? Where is Wosler?’ Well, it turns out that we were actually selected.
Yeah, so, to just answer your question, I didn't expect to win. We went there with the goal of pitching to one investor. After the event, he said he was very interested and gave us a lot of feedback. He didn’t invest but he did introduce us to investors he thought would be interested… and he remains open to give advice when needed.
How was WOSLER founded?
Well, I started a company when I was in medical school. The idea was very simple. The goal was to improve access to diagnostic imaging for people in small towns. And it was based on my own experience working, well, not working, but shadowing doctors in small towns and then I learned that people in these places have to travel hours. For some it's so inconvenient that sometimes people in some places get on the plane for an ultrasound.
In some places in Canada the vast majority of people travel. They drive two, three hours for something as basic… there was a patient who suddenly passed away from breast cancer because they couldn't get imaging in time, that's really how the company started.
We started to struggle, initially we thought it was just a service problem. So we opened services, partnered with local clinics. But then we quickly realized that it was just a labor problem. It was really challenging to recruit and retain the people, the specialists within these towns to actually conduct scans.
We eventually decided to change our strategy a little bit…We started acting like a technology startup where we had an equity option for each sonographer. This is undone in healthcare. You don't see healthcare companies give employees equity options. It just does not exist.
Especially in Canada. So we adopted that strategy and that actually started to help because we then started attracting sonographers that really cared about what we were doing and believed in it…But eventually, even the recruitment that is also, this strategy also became really, really challenging to maintain.
So we started looking for other solutions, and that's when we transitioned to a technology approach. At the time, it sounded like a crazy idea, which is using robotics to do ultrasound scans remotely. I don't know how we managed to convince ourselves that it was going to work.
We started learning a lot about robotics. And, you know, brought in my other co-founder at the time. And, yeah, raised our first angel investment without even having any solution just by building almost like a video game robot that you could control with some controller.
But it's not an actual robot, it's just a software robot. That's how we raised the first $200,000.
How were you selected to be the first ever startup to run a tele-operated ultrasound scan in Saudi Arabia?
That was actually thanks to Alberta Innovates. They had this program where they selected companies to go to Saudi Arabia and meet the Ministry of Health in Saudi Arabia to share ideas and explore opportunities for collaboration. We applied and we were accepted so we went and it was really interesting just seeing the hospital, it's Saudi’s first virtual hospital.
If you go to that hospital, It's a super futuristic place with monitors all over the place. They even have ICU they run from that hub; they have imaging as well as that, they have CT and MRI, they control all of that remotely. But they had no ultrasonic capability which was very interesting for us, so we informed them of what we're building and we had that the former chief medical officer use it to perform ultrasound on an Advantium from there to London, Ontario Canada. Actually, he was the second person to perform teleoperated ultrasound in Saudi Arabia. Marco, my co-founder, was the first. And then that's how we were able to show them that this actually works.
We explored how it could work in Saudi Arabia and obviously this is a medical device so we're gonna have to get clearance in Saudi Arabia but their process is actually similar to FDA in the U.S so that makes it super easy to get FDA in Saudi Arabia. That's one of the things we're working on and I think that the business opportunity was so good that we actually have the former chief medical officer who is now the chief innovation officer of that hospital sitting on the board as one of our advisors and we also now have a distribution agreement with a distributor in Saudi Arabia.
What are your concerns about current public conversations around private clinics and access?
If you look at the Google reviews from our clinic in Halifax, you'll see at least one comment where someone is cursing at us. And that's because, you know, the Nova Scotia government just hasn't developed a reimbursement strategy for private companies…In many places in Canada, imaging is covered by the provincial insurance so it's publicly funded but it's privately provided right?…The provincial governments just haven't set up a reimbursement strategy that makes it possible for, you know, imaging clinics, for instance, to bill them directly. So as a result, we then have to bill patients. So our clinic in Halifax is the only place where people pay out of pocket for imaging.
I think people are working with privately delivered care. They just don't want to pay out of pocket.
What’s next for WOSLER?
Right now, our business model is- we operate the clinics right now and the clinics are owned by us. Moving forward, the business model will change, what we actually intend to build is… think of it as the Uber of Sonography, where we don't employ the sonographers anymore, they become their own independent people they work from home, we just become facilitators and the device is just a ticket into the platform. In fact, our strategy is to market to sonographers, not really to clinics.
We want to have as many sonographers show interest in being part of this because it creates an opportunity for them to make money and work from home. And then we leverage the wait list of sonographers that we've got, to clinics and hospitals. Clinics and hospitals want sonographers. We have what sonographers want. So, we get sonographers, because we know clinics and hospitals want them, and then we sell our device to them so that they can then get access to those sonographers.”
How do you plan to expand WOSLER in the coming years?
I guess we actually underestimated our growth. I looked back at the business plan that I drafted after the company was started and now looking at the financial projection - it was nothing compared to what we managed to do. It just kind of tells you that we didn't think we would be able to do this, but we managed to do it. I think moving forward, though, our strategy is going to evolve. Most of our attention now is focused on regulatory clearance and research and development.
Right now, our primary focus is getting the device cleared and we also have the overarching platform in progress because the device itself would have to operate under a platform that would have the opera stenography application. That platform is also currently in the works, in fact, we're launching one component of it.
Just today we reached about 85% success rate with the HILUM Admin which is basically what we use right now to help facilitate patient appointment scheduling and check-ins for imaging. And then a few other things planned within that platform. The Sonosystem directly connects to that platform. So right now, our primary goal is to clear Sonosystem, before the end of this year in Canada.
Number two is to have the HILUM platform used not just in our clinics, but in other clinics, even if it's not used right away with the Sonosystem even if it's just used for the admin component of things. So that's really our primary goal, actually just today we reached about 85% success rate with the HILUM admin. It handles appointments scheduling and things like that…But these are all tied to labor, HILUM Admin solves the clerical receptionist labor in Healthcare, Sono-System solves the sonographer labor.
Do you think tech-enabled, remote diagnostics will become the new standard?
Yeah, I think it's inevitable. I mean, this has to be there is no other way. This has to be the way, I’m sure of it…And I think the solution will be not just remote, but actually will be AI augmented. Because what we've done is we've just solved one component of it, which is just the reach component of the problem. The next stage of the problem is the actual scaling of productivity. Instead of one sonographer reaching patients 5,000 kilometers away, it becomes one sonographer supervising three four five different Sono-System at the same time each Sono-System communicating with the sonographer if they have any issue and the sonographer taking over in instances when the solar system itself cannot perform the entire scan autonomously
The BBVA team was inspired by Henry’s vision of a future where no one loses a loved one due to lack of access to essential diagnostic tools. WOSLER’s innovations may soon make that a reality.