Harnessing AI in operations and products will earn competitive advantage
PointClickCare’s success was built on disrupting the healthcare tech market. Today’s aspiring disruptors must understand and harness the power of AI, says co-founder Mike Wessinger.
PointClickCare is a leading healthcare technology platform enabling meaningful care collaboration and real-time patient insights. But co-founder Mike Wessinger is candid about the eureka moment that enabled the fledgling company to disrupt the market and launch the company’s success.
Serving a heavily-regulated market with no technical sophistication and no budget to upgrade, PointClickCare decided to offer internet delivery on a cost per patient day subscription basis.
In seeking to solve a business problem, the company was pioneering a SaaS model, Wessinger notes, “before anybody could spell SaaS.” He adds: “We had no idea this was going to evolve to be the most popular enterprise software model of software as a service.”
AI adopters will secure advantage
In the years that followed, PointClickCare maintained its advantage, through constant heavy investment in R&D.
Today Wessinger sees a new disruptive force emerging in the form of AI. Businesses that work to understand and embrace the technology will differentiate themselves in future, he believes, and PointClickCare intends to be among them.
The company is investing in AI not just in customer products, “but also in our own productivity – how we write code, how we run the organization, incorporating those tools so that every person in our organization has AI as a force multiplier,” Wessinger says.
Existing customer base drives growth
He is confident that PointClickCare can sustain its high growth trajectory, not least by adding additional sales to its existing customers in long-term and post-acute care.
While the company has a big market share, product consumption among clients tends to be low. This offers potential for 15 to 20 years’ further growth, says Wessinger: “Because we’ve been investing in customer satisfaction and high net promoter score for the last 24 years, we’ve earned the right to solve more problems for our customers.”
“Because we’ve been investing in customer satisfaction and high net promoter score for the last 24 years, we’ve earned the right to solve more problems for our customers.”
Mike Wessinger, co-founder and Executive Chair, PointClickCare
Data sharing offers new revenue potential
This in turn will enable the company to invest in new growth areas, such as care coordination. Wessinger says the company is so far “just scratching the surface” of its potential to support more efficient sharing of information on patient care.
Commercializing its data to support life science companies in drug development represents another potential income stream: “We’ve just got such an incredible wealth of data, and we can leverage AI to help solve real problems in healthcare.”
Tax regime risks Canadian brain drain
PointClickCare’s Canadian base positions it closer to most of the U.S. market than Californian competitors, Wessinger points out. He is also enthusiastic about the country’s immigration policy – which allows the company to recruit ideal candidates from across the world – as well as its home-grown skills.
“Our schools are producing phenomenal talent. Engineer for engineer, we produce as good talent as anywhere,” he says. “So we’ve got this incredible pool.”
He warns, however, that Canada’s tax regime risks draining tech talent and investment to the U.S. Like most Canadian tech entrepreneurs, he prefers to live in his home country, but “you have an obligation to operate in the most productive environment, and increasingly that’s looking less and less like Canada, unfortunately.”
“Our schools are producing phenomenal talent. Engineer for engineer, we produce as good talent as anywhere.”
Mike Wessinger, co-founder and Executive Chair, PointClickCare