VC funding helps firm market its health software

By Rebecca Penty, Telegraph Journal | Link to original article

Tristan Rutter's Fredericton business has long been about health-care reform.

But instead of running projects as a consultancy, Rutter and his team are now pushing product.

The CEO of Populus Global Solutions just nabbed a $200,000 venture capital investment from the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation to market his company's electronic health record software, on top of angel funding the firm recently accessed.

“Securing this VC investment, it is critical for us,” Rutter said Monday.

His company now has an employee working in sales on the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia and another business development specialist in Johannesburg tackling the South African market to complement the team of 12 in Fredericton.

Populus Global Solutions' ACSiS software system, based on a single electronic patient record, allows clinicians and primary care decision-makers to track the health of individual patients and entire populations.

Different modules within the system allow customers to deal with prescriptions, the financial aspects of the health care sector, maternal child health issues, HIV/AIDS data, laboratory testing, supply chain management and human resources.

Rutter said that in Belize, where the ACSiS system was first implemented, the software captures more than 90 per cent of all encounters between patients and physicians. Pharmaceutical expenditures have gone down some nine per cent since its implementation in 2004, which Rutter partly attributes to his firm's software.

“Once you have the detailed data, then you're really putting people in a position where they can do an informed job,” Rutter said.

The genesis of Populus Global Solutions, formed last year from the assets of a previous consulting company, Accesstec Inc., occurred after Rutter and his colleagues realized they had the expertise to not only co-ordinate health sector projects, but create the solutions.

Rutter's father John Rutter formed a consulting business in 1967 and the company first tackled health reform with a project in Bhutan in the early 1980s.

Accesstec won a bid to implement a health solution in the small Central American country of Belize in 2004 through the Inter-American Development Bank and ended up developing the nation's health information software system.

The firm then won contracts to do the same in Saint Lucia and Saint Vincent.

“What we've done is we've pioneered and we've proved three times that we have a solution that does work,” Rutter said.

The firm earned a feather in its cap when the World Health Organization's Health Metrics Network biennial report for 2008-2009 cited Belize's health information system as having reduced instances of hypertension – among the top three causes of death in the country and a leading cause of hospital admission.

In 2006, a disease management protocol for hypertension was included in the health information system that notifies staff when thresholds for hypertension are exceeded, informs about medicating and offers prompts when clinic or hospital visits are required.

By 2009, the number of elderly patients admitted to hospital for hypertension had fallen by 70 per cent in Belize.

Calvin Milbury, president and CEO of the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, said his organization has been watching Rutter's business over the last few years and advised him to form a new company outside the consulting firm to sell the software solution.

“They realized they were on to something that was more of a product company that had growth potential,” Milbury said.

The New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, an arms-length organization that aims to bridge financing gaps for high-growth, early-stage companies, looks for innovative firms that solve “market pain,” Milbury said.

“They're in a market where there's lots of need,” he said of Populus Global Solutions.

“They have a proprietary solution that's innovative. And they have a team that's experienced and technically minded.”