I'm not sure exactly where the name Reliq comes from. I came on board afterwards.
Thank you very much, members of the committee, for having me here today. I appreciate being part of this conversation on diabetes management in Canada.
I'm a front-line practitioner. I practise internal medicine and geriatric medicine. I deal with patients day to day. I'm an assistant professor at McMaster University. I work at Hamilton Health Sciences.
Part of my reason for getting involved in technology companies is based on my day-to-day struggles with patients I see, and the limitations of the tools we have at our disposal. I've been involved in the technology space for the last six years, building customized electronic medical records, as well as physician and nursing communication tools, and successfully commercializing them. I have a passion for improving the health care of our population, and I think a great way to do that is through technology—not technologies in isolation, but the appropriate technologies for appropriate populations.
Reliq is a publicly traded Canadian company. We're based in Hamilton as well as Vancouver. We're traded on the TSX Venture Exchange market. We've been successful commercially, so we've had a lot of business in the United States dealing with Medicare and medicated populations, with diabetes and hypertension there, and we're expanding to Australia as well. Our leadership team is very qualified in capital markets and has built multiple ventures successfully in the global marketplace.
My job, however, is taking the success and the resources we gain and translating them into patient results. Really, that's my passion. I think it's great when you can leverage large numbers of resources to actually build quality health care technology and impact patient change.
We've been one of the most successful companies on the TSX Venture Exchange in the last 12 months.
The core of our technology is remote patient monitoring. What that means is, instead of patients being in isolation, checking their blood glucose at home, coming up with a very detailed diary, which is very work-intensive for them, and showing up to their patient appointment once a month or once every three months, we give them a glucometer that attaches directly to the cloud. Every time they're able to test their blood glucose, a nurse or a physician on the other end, through a patient portal, can have access to their readings in real time.
This also applies to the symptoms they're experiencing. It allows for two-way communication.
For instance, instead of saying, “Hey, my blood glucose levels have been elevated for the past three months. I'm now going to show up to my physician's office, and they're going to do something about it,” your blood glucose is elevated on Monday, so I change your medications. Your blood glucose is elevated on Thursday, so I increase your medications. The time to control diabetes improves. It's the same thing if they're having markedly abnormal values. If your blood sugars are 22, that's very bad. If they're running that way for several days, we can intervene and say, “Hey, what's wrong with this patient, and what can we do to help them?”
The other aspect of the technology is not just the remote monitoring of biometric data—to be clear, we do this not only for diabetes, but also for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart failure and wound care management. It's also designed to increase the engagement of the patient on the other end. They have two-way communication with their health care provider through text message, through educational materials and through telemedicine visits. To find out what these problems are that the patient's experiencing, why not hop on a phone call with them, make sure they're taking their medications, help them with dietary advice and move things along?
We've had success outside of Canada, but our target populations in Canada are indigenous populations. We received a grant through the Ontario Centres of Excellence to do a pilot project in Sioux Lookout, through the Meno Ya Win Health Centre. It's been amazing to see the uptake of the health care providers, administrators and patients there. We've onboarded 50 patients initially, and we're looking to onboard another 50 patients there.
As you can imagine, it's a remote location. Sioux Lookout is three hours north of Thunder Bay, and the populations they serve are between 400 and 3,000 people spread out over thousands of square kilometres. The patients with diabetes we're trying to serve in these locations have to fly in for their management. You and I go to an appointment and we drive 10 minutes down the street. Not only do they have to fly in to their appointment, they have to stay overnight.
Occasionally they are not able to stay overnight in Sioux Lookout and have to drive another hour and a half to another town to stay in a hotel, wake up at 4:30 in the morning, and then drive back to Sioux Lookout to have their appointment. If they miss their appointment, they are on the hook and have to pay for their flight themselves, or their band is responsible for paying for their flight. This is very problematic as you can imagine.
With our technology, we're able to monitor them remotely in the communities where they live, and provide the care we've outlined for them.
We're very happy with the engagement we've received to date. We will have 100 patients on the platform within the next month, and I will be flying up in the next month or so to see how things are going up there. We're very excited about this opportunity.
In the meantime, Reliq has donated all of our staff time to accomplish this. This is a project of passion for us. I think it's a great opportunity when companies can be successful and leverage the benefits of global markets to impact health care outcomes locally. We would like to reproduce this across Canada.
The other thing we understand, and I really appreciate what my colleagues are saying here, is the person-centred nature of what we do. We're not imagining that we're just going to take technology and dump it on people and expect it to work. It takes engagement at all levels and understanding what the patient is struggling with and also what the health care providers are struggling with in their communities.
If you don't understand it, and if you don't understand the human nature side of it and the human resources side of it, then you will have no hope of just dumping technology on somebody and expecting it to work. It just won't happen.
If we leverage the capital market side of things, our keen understanding of human nature, the patient populations we're dealing with, and the experienced technology team we have, I think we will be able to accomplish miraculous things.
I've been struggling to implement health care solutions, information technology solutions. It's a struggle trying to engage nurses who are burned out or physicians who are burned out or already tired and have a lot on their plates. Seeing how engaged this community is provides me with hope that we will be able to replicate this across Canada. They are so engaged. They are on calls, very excited to roll things out. To be able to put 50 patients on our platform in just under a month is a remarkable uptake to me. There are lots of problems we will be able to solve.
I'm very thankful for being able to talk here today. I'm very happy that we have been able to share the commercial success we have, but I am also looking for your input or ideas or advice on how we can take our technology across Canada and reproduce these results.
We're very evidence-based. We want to document that we're providing value to people. The only way to do that is in sequential rollouts with larger and larger populations and by undergoing a learning process. We don't have everything figured out perfectly; you need to learn the nuances of each community you go into. I'm very happy to be here today and to be able to share our success with you and also gain insights from you through the conversations we will be having.
Thank you very much.