I’m the founder and CEO of Myca, but my story really begins in late 1999, when I had the good fortune to meet Leonard Schlemm, co-founder with Mark Mastrov of 24Hour Fitness (24hourfitness.com), the largest chain of health clubs in the world. I was a struggling entrepreneur in the tough world of fitness equipment manufacturing and I presented Leonard with a series of exercise machines equipped with PCs and connected to the internet.
He quickly understood the vision and became my partner. Through a series of mergers, we ended 2001 operating more than 10,000 internet-equipped pieces of fitness equipment in more than 500 health clubs across North America.
I guess it’s not surprising that my desk has an integrated treadmill, where I walk during my day.
As the dot.com boom turned to bust, Josee Morin received an email from the CIO of a Dallas hospital. Could we equip his hospital beds with touchscreen computers connected to the internet, just like the machines in his fitness club? The business case was compelling: bring information to the bedside to reduce medical errors and improve patient safety.
Leonard, Josee, Martin Pierre Roy, Georges Drapeau, and I--with a host of other brave souls-- kicked off the adventure and a new company, Eon Media Inc, which was quickly acquired by Cardinal Health Inc (NYSE/CAH) one year later. I still treasure the brief visits I had with Cardinal’s founder, Robert Walter, over my next six years at the company as VP of Clinical Technologies and Services. Building an $85 billion dollar company is a feat, and he left me with his indelible vision of Cardinal as a company that enables health care.
The hospital world was filled with incredibly dedicated people, working with just as incredibly outdated information and communication systems. I began to wonder how I could enable better communication between patient and doctor outside the four walls of the hospital. How could I connect mobile consumers to the mainframe of medical computing?
Myca was born. And again Leonard signed up as my partner.
Myca’s first product, Myfoodphone.com, proved that consumers were willing to pay for personalized health advice delivered via a hybrid mobile/PC experience. When Sprint signed an exclusive to market the product and the Economist featured it in its technology review (Doctor in The Pocket), I knew we were digging in the right direction. Myfoodphone matured into MycaNutrition.com, an amazing platform enabling professional dieticians to engage their patients and extend their practice.
Myfoodphone got me acquainted with Don Jones, VP of Health Technologies at Qualcomm and a pioneer in all things that converge wireless and healthcare. Over dinner one evening in Del Mar, California, he laid out the idea of deploying a telehealth platform on video conference-enabled cell phones. Don’s wisdom focused me on the feature set that would make mobile telehealth relevant to healthcare professionals.
I’m driven by curiosity: how can Myca make healthcare more accessible? How can Myca make doctors more efficient? For all the innovation the internet has brought us, it represents just a small step before the bigger leap in interconnectivity. Consider that the internet is used by just a fraction of Earthís population. What happens when it makes its way into most of the worldís homes and when health devices like smart bandaids become net-ready?
What happens when vastly more US doctors than the current 2% begin to use e-mail to communicate with their patients?
The future of Myca looks very promising indeed.
