Dr. Richard Vandegriend: Arya Health Is a Vancouver-based Startup That Produces Clinical Cloud Based, Enterprise Software Solutions (EHRs) For Canadian Physicians

Arya Health is a Vancouver-based startup that produces clinical cloud based, enterprise software solutions (EHRs) for Canadian physicians and allied health professionals.

Our mission is to build technology for physicians that is beautiful, intuitive, easy to use, saves them headaches and saves them money.

Our vision Our vision is to be a catalyst for change, bringing new and improved technology to the current healthcare market.

Tell us about yourself?

I’m a physician, and like the other co-founders, have been frustrated and burnt out from using terribly designed health technology solutions chosen by people who aren’t actually using those solutions.

After years of complaining about the situation, we felt we couldn’t just ignore the problem and had to do something about it.

If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

I would tell myself to stockpile toilet paper before the pandemic began! Just kidding. I’d tell myself not to hesitate, to dive in more fully.

We’re doing something great and more and more we see that our vision is resonating with other health care professionals. We’re on the right path but that natural trepidation when you start something new comes at an opportunity cost.

What problem does your business solve?

The main problem that the founders and I see with healthcare technology, and why it’s so poorly designed, is that it’s traditionally built by businesspeople, administrators, and developers.

Although these people are important, they aren’t the actual people working with the products directly day to day to take care of patients or run clinics.

At Arya Health, we start with the end-user in mind. Arya is out to give physicians an EMR system that is beautiful, intuitive, easy to use, saves them headaches and saves them money.

What is the inspiration behind your business?

After having firsthand experience spending years using outdated and antiquated Electronic Medical Record (EMR) technology, My co-founders and I had had enough and knew something had to be done.

It bothered us to see how painfully inefficient and unnecessarily difficult it can often be to provide high quality care from within our current healthcare technology ecosystem.

We started Arya Health developed an electronic health record and patient handover system built by physicians for physicians. It helps manage your patient records simply, intuitively, and efficiently.

What is your magic sauce?

Simple- Arya software is made to make healthcare professional’s lives simpler. By providing them with an EHR system that is so easy to understand and navigate with limited clicks, easy to understand menus and intuitive design, we have separated ourselves by creating the most user friendly EHR on the market.

Intuitive- Arya enhances our strengths as being build by Physicians, it allows us to fully understand the pain points that our users see. This allows us to build an ultra intuitive platform that most users need no training to begin to use.

Efficient- The cost savings and revenue generation that Arya can provide a clinic is another area where we differ ourselves from competition.

This applies to generating notes, ordering tests, prescribing meds and e-faxing. Because Arya is so efficient it results in 5+ minutes saved per patient, which means you can see an additional 4-8 patients per day.

In our case studies our users net increase in clinical revenues is between 50-100K per year, which over the lifetime of a clinic is a huge increase.

What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?

There is so much we want to accomplish. We want to help fix healthcare and use the power of well designed tech to overcome the overwhelming inefficiencies endemic to our system. We are continually layering on complexity as we advance our product.

We began with a robust database and the delivered the core functionality of an EMR in a way that fundamentally changed physicians practices. Now we are releasing features that meaningfully empower the patient in their health with online booking, patient portal, integrated Telehealth and more.

We look forward to further integrations that allow us to enter new sectors and international markets. We want to be a dominant provider of health technology solutions worldwide.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?

We launched our product weeks before the pandemic took hold. The sudden shift to virtual care and limitation of face-to-face interactions created difficulties with usual marketing and sales, but also created an opportunity.

We were able to rapidly develop our own virtual health platform within Arya, addressing an incredible need within our users and market.

This was something always on our radar, but we initially had it on the back burner as there was very little uptake or demand for Telehealth until the pandemic created a sudden urgent need.

How do people get involved/buy into your vision?

We want healthcare professionals to reach out and see the Arya Effect for themselves, please follow our LinkedIn account and reach out at https://www.linkedin.com/company/arya-health/.