All About the Clinic!

Team Kabuk is extremely pleased to introduce long awaited support for clinics! 

So what's new?

Clinic Creation: Clinic owners can now create a clinic and easily add practitioners. More key functionality for clinics will be heading your way very soon, including the ability to assign administrators to oversee practitioner schedules.

Up next? Some exciting new resources, admin functionality, testimonials, and the ability to claim your profile!

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The Big Bad Business Plan

The problem with business plans, in the most traditional sense of the term, is that they are static;  A window into, or snapshot of, your business at a very specific moment in time. You write one, or many - everyone seems to have their own required standard template - and then they just sit there and stagnate.

As a start-up, your business is changing exponentially every day. New obstacles and data have a way of making themselves known constantly and your strategy needs to shift to keep up. Unless you are updating your business plan constantly - and I do mean constantly- your business plan is never going to reflect the up-to-date state of the market or your business. Who really has time for that? If you have the resources for this great! As a start-up we certainly don't.

Writing a business plan can be very time consuming. Some of these monsters can get upwards of 100 pages. A tedious, repetitive document (and from the ones I've read often badly written). I find myself wondering if anyone (other than me) actually reads these in their entirety. If you are a VC or accelerator reading this, I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

Unfortunately, many start-ups seem to be using the argument against the business plan as a way of avoiding the labour intensive stage of getting to know the market inside and out. This is not at all the argument that I am making. I think that proper market research is an imperative step for any company, start-up or not. Without doing a SWOT analysis, how can you properly position yourself to compete with incumbents and create barriers to entry for newcomers? How will you be able to recognize market events that are negative or positive game changers for your industry. What about TAM? Many entrepreneurs shy away from talking money especially in a social innovation start-up like ours where the passion to change the world is thought to be enough. Without revenues down the road, and knowing the size of your market, how will you pay your employees and be able to enact any change at all?

A more dynamic way of doing things is necessary. I am definitely in favour of weekly progress meetings. Everyone sits around and summarizes some of the changes or new expressions of interest that they have seen in their area, what that means for the company and we brainstorm, if needed, some of the things we need to do to keep on top of things. Is any of this reflected in our business plan? No.

Do we have a business plan? Absolutely. We wrote our first business plan when applying for a grant. The particular organization that we were 'writing' our plan for had a standard template. In truth, it drove me crazy. As a veteran of the sell-side, I am no slouch when it comes to writing readable, business documents. I'm also highly adverse to repeating any piece of information and well aware that it is the rare individual who reads beyond the first page of any report. Once all was said and done, our "business plan" took weeks to get into the right format and was a painful, Quasimodo-like document. I would be reticent to share this document with anyone that I didn't wish painful torture upon.

Am I anti-business plan? Not at all. I'm sure I'll be asked to write many more business plans in the future (hopefully in a more efficient template or one of my own choosing).

In my opinion, a well written two page executive summary, demonstrating that you know your market and are willing to talk about relevant areas in greater detail would be a far more effective endeavor.

What do you think about business plans? Good, bad, indifferent?

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The Trouble With the Cross-Training Hygienist

I recently became aware of the trend towards cross-training in dental offices. I immediately called my friend,
a dental hygienist to see if "cross-training" in the world of dentistry was a real, or common, phenomena. I was somewhat unsettled to learn that it was.

It was time to do some research.

So - what exactly is cross-training anyhow? Cross-training is the practice of training an employee who has been hired for one role to do tasks associated with another. This has historically been used to increase engagement as employees learn new skills and gain additional experience and improve workplace efficiency.

In recent years, it seems that dental hygienists are being asked to step into a number of different shoes, including the role of a dental assistant and the front desk staff. Those who aren't agreeable to filling in when times are busy can risk being branded not team players.

Why doesn't this work? There are a number of reasons. Cross- training typically works best when employees get the opportunity to learn new skills that help career growth. Cross-training really shouldn't be used as a way to eliminate job positions, or avoid bringing on new staff to meet demands.

A dental office staff all have well defined technical skills. As The Myth of Cross-Training accurately notes, cross-training in a dental office devalues everyone's roles and training. Everyone has different skills. As the co-founder of a start-up, I'm very familiar with needing to fill a number of roles both technical and not. That front office desk team has honed their customer service skills and is familiar and comfortable with the software you use to book appointments and bill patients. A dental office assistant is more comfortable sterilizing equipment. Sometime cross-training can actually end up costing you more in terms of efficiency, staff engagement, and ultimately customer satisfaction - a value that's terribly hard to quantify - than you save.

But what is one to do in a small practice where every dollar counts? It's expensive to run your own practice and its not always feasible to bring on new staff. Not to worry - it's situations like this for which we created Kabuk. Kabuk let's you focus on your customers and helps increase office efficiencies. We are here to give your front office desk a break, reducing the amount of time they need to be on the phone scheduling appointments, and letting them focus on other tasks like increasing customer satisfaction. Empowering clients to schedule and manage their appointments online can significantly increase the efficiency of your office. As a bonus, our helpful automated appointment reminders - proven to reduce no-shows- mean that your office staff has one less task to worry about.

Its time to bring booking online for your practice! Sign up on Kabuk for your free trial today.

Not ready to think about online bookings? We are currently offering free profile listings on our platform. Its just like LinkedIn for healthcare pros and a great way to increase your online presence and get found by more patients today.

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Funding Fumbles and Chatter from a Woman Living the Tech Start-up Life

I can't tell you how many articles I've read espousing the need to fund more women led companies, or
provide more mentorship opportunities.

Countless.

The truth? Getting funding for a start-up is hard no matter who you are. Is it harder for a woman? Maybe.... Probably. I'm certainly not trying to downplay the stats on men vs. women-led companies getting VC funding.  In truth, the bigger problem for us was experience (i.e. previous successful exits) and connections. Unfortunately, the whole thing is somewhat of a vicious circle. (But please, whoever you are with funds pen-marked for female-led companies, do give me a shout because it certainly seems like a funding desert from my seat at the table). 

Does that mean that start-ups without previous experience or a tie-in to someone entrenched in the start-up sphere can't get funding? No. We've all read success stories of a viral product from complete unknowns.

Is it a lot harder? Absolutely.

As you know, things began rather slowly at Kabuk. After all, we were all working full time jobs and doing whatever we could in our spare time. Funding wasn't even a question at that point. Any accelerator, incubator or VC we approached said we were too early stage. At the beginning, we were 100% self-funded and we did what we could. We had a great idea, but execution took time as we had to weigh every penny (should I be saying nickle now?) spent. A company with prior start-up experience or personal capital can almost, shall we say, bypass this teething stage. They have the resources to get things done quickly and try multiple approaches. They have the connections and clout to forgo the "You're a pre-revenue start-up. Come back to me after you start generating revenue" talk.

Does it bother me when I read in the news that those same companies who turned us away are now funding earlier stage companies with very similar concepts but co-founders with proven start-up success? 100%, but it doesn't change where we are today and how we got here. Would we have gotten better reception if I were a man? Who can really say? Its certainly possible that a more aggressive personality and inclusion in the boy's club could have opened more doors. What I really believe is that lack of start-up experience and cred was more of a factor.

What's the solution to all of this? If I was sitting on the venture capital side of the table, I would undoubtedly rather risk my capital on a known commodity too. Is that the best way to build and nurture a culture of innovation? Not really.

We were nearly at launch, having self-funded Kabuk's development for at least a year, when we raised our friends and family round. I will be forever grateful to all of our wonderful investors who believed in us and gave us the capital we needed to go it full time and make us a "real company". Perhaps having such a difficult journey to get here makes us appreciate every new feature, every new release even more.

Anyone involved in a start-up will know that funding is a stressful, soul-crushing process. I have to say, however, that the start-up culture among Canadian companies is fantastic. Companies and associations in Canada always seem ready to have an intro conversation regarding synergies or take a look at our demo. I think Canada is one of the best places to be involved in a start-up and I wouldn't trade places for the world. Still, there is much that could be done in terms of increasing access to and availability of funding.

I don't have all the answers and, yes, talk is cheap. What are some of the ways you can think of to build a better culture of innovation in Canada? What would you like to see?

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The Top Ten Benefits of Physiotherapy

Excited to share our brand new infographic on physiotherapy treatment in Canada with all of you!

First – a little bit of history on Physiotherapy as a profession in Canada. Physiotherapy in Canada has a rich history, dating back to the end of World War I. At the time, the need for physiotherapy was driven by the return of wounded soldiers, many of whom were in need of some form of physical rehabilitation. The Canadian Physiotherapy Association (CPA) was established in 1920.

Today there are over 20,000 physiotherapists in Canada, of which ~7,000 practice in Ontario. Approximately half of our physiotherapists work in private practices, with others can be found working in hospitals, community health centres, residential care and assisted-living facilities and workplaces.

Did you know that many Canadians are eligible to have physiotherapy services reimbursed by their health insurance provider. No referral is required to see a physiotherapist, although some health insurance providers require a physician referral for reimbursement.

What do you think of our new infographic? We plan to produce a number of these infographics focusing in on different healthcare professionals and trends. Which profession or topic would you like to see us feature next?

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The Connected Patient

In today's data crazy world it seems like everyone is online, all the time. Healthcare is no different. Patients are searching for health information online constantly. Is the information that they are finding enough?

Interestingly, while healthcare inquiries are one of the most common google queries, few providers are fully making the leap into the internet savvy, online all-the-time world. While 90% of patients surveyed by Canada Health Infoway said that they would book appointments online, only a fraction of healthcare providers currently provide electronic services such as e-booking. Over the next few years, we believe this will change drastically.

There has been a generational shift. Today, people are less inclined to spend time booking appointments over the phone. There is no patience for waiting on hold, playing telephone tag, or enduring tedious e-mail exchanges in order to secure an appointment. With travel bookings and restaurant reservations online, not to mention banking and dating, it is frankly shocking that healthcare has yet to make the shift.

In addition to booking, as a patient myself, I speak from experience when I say that I want to have my healthcare information at my fingertips. I don't want to wait for administrative staff to call me with appointment reminders and then realize I've double booked myself. Worse yet is when no reminder comes at all and I miss important appointments. Like all of you, I want to be able to take control of my healthcare. Addicted to having everything online at my convenience, I want to be able to log-in to one place to view all my upcoming and past appointments, and have the control to cancel or reschedule in real-time. I rarely pick up my phone anymore and so I want my appointment reminders to be electronic too.

We are the connected patient and we want it all! 

Spoilt? Maybe. 

More efficient? Without a doubt.

Listen to what your patients are telling you. We want our healthcare providers to concentrate on us, not the administrative side of things. There are a whole slew of new services for the connected patient. Kabuk is here to make your lives easier and your patients happier.

Let patients find you online today at Kabuk today!

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The Making of Kabuk - Part 2

We met Babak over spaghetti in the St. Lawrence Market area. As most of you living the start-up life know, some of the best connections for partnerships and collaborations are made through your existing network. Babak was no exception – a fellow Waterloo grad, we met through mutual friends. There was an instant fit with our team – great news since by this point we had been searching high and low for the RIGHT technical co-founder for several months.

Finding the right team takes time, but is something you can’t afford to take shortcuts on. People are the backbone behind any organization, big or small and oftentimes the difference between success and failure.

In the early days at Kabuk, we were all part time which made things very slow. Still, pre-Babak we were an idea and a bunch of scribbles. Post-Babak, we were a real company with real development goals.

To development neophytes it can come as a huge surprise that there are multiple layers of design that need to come into place before you can even begin coding. On the back-end, time is spent designing an efficient architecture. On the front-end, there are layers of work done by User Experience developers, Graphic Designers and User Interface Developers.

At the beginning, Lucas and I worked on flows ourselves and with Babak ‘hacked’ together initial designs. Style guides and wireframes were foreign entities to us and we operated under the misconception that the images in our head would easily transcend to the web. We could not have been more wrong.

Source: http://www.projectcartoon.com/cartoon/2

I cannot emphasize how important it is to spend some time and money up front and get a user experience (UX) developer on board to map out user flows and optimize usability. Doing this right at the start would have saved us a lot of money and time in the long run. Having a graphic designer – sometimes the same person as your UX developer but often not - to put these flows into actual mocks will save your front-end developers time (they will be able to straight out code rather than attempt to both envision then code) and you stress from seeing something completely different from your goal on screen.

Ripping out code is a lot more costly than giving your designer a few revisions or tweaks. While spending the money on full flows and designs may be infeasible money-wise, I highly recommend at the minimum getting some basic wireframes and a style guide to make sure your finished platform looks like a cohesive entity rather than cobbled together pieces.

While some developers can play with both front-end and back-end, the best specialize, so to codify your pretty designs the next ingredient is a UI developer.

Once our initial team was in place, we were introduced to a world of development tools (we use pivotal tracker for feature planning, bug filing and more and github for code management), rigorous QA cycles for releases and the very real danger of feature creep!

Stayed tuned for part 3 of the Making of Kabuk where we move from team building to going full time and our first real release! Read Part 1 of the Making of Kabuk HERE.

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Medical Herbalist Demystified!

At Kabuk, we help patients find a variety of specialists from the well-known to the hard-to-find. One of the rarer specialties we support is, without a doubt, medical herbalists. Once we added support for medical herbalists last weekend the questions began to roll in.

What is a medical herbalist? What conditions to they treat? What sort of training do they undergo? How would a typical consultation with a medical herbalist work?

Luckily, we were fortunate enough to have Medical Herbalist Morwenna Given on hand to answer some of your questions. You can find out more about Morwenna here.

AS: So what exactly is a Medical Herbalist?

MG: The origins of Medical Herbalists as a licensed profession date back to 1542 in the UK. Medical herbalists combine the art of holistic treatment and the science of plant healing properties to treat their patients.

AS: Can anyone call themselves a Medical Herbalist? What sort of training did you need to undergo?

MG: Absolutely not! Medical Herbalists undergo rigorous training in herbal medicines and are governed by the National Institute of Medical Herbalists in England. In Europe, if you claimed to be a Medical Herbalist you would have to show the evidence of the professional training required by law – in my case a BSC which took me 6 years and membership within the professional body which is currently European Health Practitioners Association under which NIMH and CPP specifically relate to herbalists.  In North America, unfortunately, the term Medical Herbalist is much more loosely used but it is generally accepted that you must have a BSC or an MSC to professionally call yourself a medical herbalist.

In my case, after completing my undergraduate and Masters degrees at Oxford, I returned to university to begin the rigorous six-year journey towards becoming a Medical Herbalist. Further training in hospitals, clinics and cancer centres internationally have allowed me to work alongside conventional practitioners, bringing patients the best of “both worlds” in their therapies.

AS: What range of conditions do you treat as a Medical Herbalist? What are some of the reasons I would have to search you out?

MG: There are many reasons to seek treatment from a medical herbalist. In my 10 years of experience, I have treated a wide variety of conditions ranging from rare blood disorders and cancers to common skin conditions. While I am trained to address a variety of illnesses from major to minor, my focus has been on MS, cancer, pre-cancerous, prostatic, thyroid and diabetic conditions. Very simply, we can resolve some conditions which conventional medicine cannot. For example there is no drug for bronchiectasis but plants can not only resolve the unpleasant symptoms but also prevent progression.

Some of the other problems my clients come to me for include the treatment/management of: 

Lung diseases such as, bronchiectasis, COPD, and asthma.  Did you know that for viral infections like Mononucleosis, influenza plant medicine is still the most effective therapy available? 

Women’s conditions such as breast cancer, menopause, PCOS, fibrocystic breasts, UTIs, herpes and, more recently, several cases of cervical dysplasia (CIN2).

Skin conditions such as eczema, psoriasis, melanomas, and warts etc.

Bone disorders (such as arthritis in all forms)

Kidney and liver diseases such as IBS, colitis, liver cirrhosis, gall bladder inflammation, and kidney stones.

Chronic auto immune conditions such as Lyme’s, Multiple Sclerosis and Fibromyalgia 

Please see my website for further information on the conditions I treat.

AS: Tell me a little bit more about the treatment process. Say I came to you to treat my eczema. What would an initial visit look like?

MG: A typical first visit at my clinic lasts approximately two hours. In our initial consultation, we would review a patient’s medical history, current diet, supplements and medications, followed by a blood pressure check, external examination and other tests necessary to address the root of the patient’s complaints. All compounds provided are designed for the individual and their presenting complaints. In the case of eczema I would look at the sites in the body and how it is presenting in that individual; compound a cream and give an internal tincture/compound/prescription as eczema starts internally in the gut so in order to resolve the condition you have to go to the source of the problem.  I would also provide appropriate lifestyle advice.

AS: Thanks so much for joining us here Morwenna! Learn more about Morwenna and her practice by visiting her page on Kabuk here.

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