Staying ahead of rapidly changing medical technology is near-impossible without access to deep pools of knowledge, according to Think Research Corporation (TSX-V:THNK), an industry leader in delivering knowledge-based digital healthcare software solutions.
The Toronto-based healthcare technology company aims to become to the medical community what Bloomberg is to the financial community.
Proactive sat down with Think Research CEO Sachin Aggarwal and asked him how he plans to achieve that.
Proactive: In your recent investment materials, you mentioned that you're becoming an essential data service for clinicians. What does this mean?
Sachin Aggarwal: Today, we have more than 300,000 doctors, nurses and pharmacists that use our solutions, and that’s through enterprise relationships. So, basically, enterprises license our solutions for their clinicians. Those doctors, nurses and pharmacists use our solutions to keep their practices up to date. So, what we do is we get new evidence and new best-practice into the hands of those clinicians, so we become a critical part of how they practice and provide patient care.
How does the Bloomberg analogy fit?
If you're familiar with Bloomberg in a finance setting, all the data and information that's available to you on Bloomberg is already available to you if you just Google it, right? But it's essentially information overload. Humans don't have the ability to synthesize that quantity of information into a usable form without assistance. And that's why Bloomberg is so critical to that sector. Similarly, in healthcare, the amount of information that our clinicians need to consume has been growing exponentially. Twenty years ago, our clinicians were able to consume or were able to keep all the necessary information in their heads. Today, we know that's just not the case. The amount of medical information and medical knowledge is doubling every few months. It's become impossible for clinicians to keep on top of all of that changing information and knowledge. So, similar to Bloomberg, our clinicians need solutions that synthesize all that information for them in a way that they can consume it easily and apply it to the care of patients.
If I'm a clinician, how does your software help me?
It depends on what kind of clinician you are. For example, if you're a doctor in a hospital, you might be using our software to actually make your decisions in real time on how to treat your patients. So, you might be using our decision support checklist, for example, to make sure you're practicing up to date medicine and you're not forgetting anything when you treat complex patients. If you're an oncologist, almost certainly we are your provider of choice for all your continuing medical education that you need to get each year to maintain your license. We are the top educator of oncologists, for example through our subsidiaries MDBriefCase and Oncology Education. If you're a pharmacist, there's a high likelihood you're using one of our solutions in your pharmacy, anywhere across Canada. These are just a few examples.
How do your recent acquisitions of Bio Pharma and Pharmapod fit your essential data strategies?
Pharmapod is a great example and was a very accretive acquisition. What Pharmapod does is it presents clinicians, specifically pharmacists in retail pharmacies, with the information that they need for one of their critical workflows, and that is reporting on all medication (errors) within their setting. That's a very knowledge-based critical workflow for them that is changing frequently with different medications, different vaccines, and so on and so forth. By acquiring Pharmapod we acquired tens of thousands of pharmacists across more than 80,000 retail pharmacies, including more than 65% of all retail pharmacies in Ontario that use the solution currently. As a consequence, we have become a critical part of the workflow and the central data service for those particular clinicians. One of our key objectives is to grow our footprint, grow the number of users that we have access to and the number of facilities, and the acquisition of Pharmapod was a big part of that.
Do you plan on doing more acquisitions and, if so, can you tell us about your acquisition plans and pipeline going forward?
It's no secret that it's a tough time for small cap companies in the public market, so it’s tough to do accretive acquisitions at our current share price and our current multiple - we’re trading below 1x of our revenue. That being said, with our recent financing, and with Beedie Capital giving us access to $25 million of convertible debt, and with our remaining acquisitions facility with Scotiabank, we have a lot of dry powder available to us. We are certainly keeping our ear to the ground, and we will be opportunistic as it relates to acquisitions. In terms of those acquisitions, what we're after is acquiring new users, so new doctors, nurses and pharmacists. That’s number one. Number two is acquiring new types of content to offer our current users, through cross-sells or up-sells, or acquiring companies that can monetize the data that we're collecting from our users. Those are the three things that we're after.
What do you see Think becoming in five years' time?
Our objective is to become the provider of choice for new knowledge and new evidence for clinicians everywhere. Like Bloomberg, our objective is to become an essential data service for clinicians everywhere. Our mission, if I can say it this way, is to organize the world’s health knowledge so everyone gets the best care.
Contact the author at stephen.gunnion@proactiveinvestors.com