(Click image above to play video)
Welcome to the one-stop shop for remote in-home health monitoring.
Soon-to be publicly-listed
Cloud DX Inc. (
TSX-V.ROSV.P,
Forum) is an innovative, cutting-edge company that offers ‘The Connected Health Kit’ – a personal health station. And here’s how it works. Vital sign readings are taken in the comfort of the patient’s own home, and the results are automatically sent to the “cloud” to be monitored remotely by physicians, caregivers, family members, and anyone else in the patient’s circle of care.
The user-friendly interface makes it quick and easy to get started and take readings. This type of remote patient monitoring lets physicians keep tabs on patients and allows early intervention to change behavior, adjust medications, or send a homecare nurse to make a house-call. As a result, patients use the emergency room less, are admitted into the hospital less frequently, and feel more in control of their health while remaining at home.
In this lively and informative video podcast, Stockhouse Media’s Dave Jackson was joined by Company CEO, Founder & President Robert Kaul to talk about the company’s unique business plan, upcoming IPO investment opportunities, and all things Cloud DX.
TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
SH: To start off with and for those who may be unaware of Cloud DX, can you tell us a bit about yourself, the company, and what exactly it does?
RK: Sure. Well, I'm 53 years old. I was born in Inuvik in the Northwest Territories and I was raised in Calgary. In 2005, I moved to the United States, specifically New York City. I had the idea of bringing Canadian innovations and technology down to the US market. So I did that for several years and along the way I was introduced to a unique new type of blood pressure device that was invented in Toronto. In 2009, I obtained the rights to that device and that's where this whole thing started for me. My co-founders and I created Cloud DX in 2014 by acquiring the assets and the technology around that device from the company that invented it and we've built our entire Cloud DX platform on those innovations. What we do now is we manufacture new devices that we develop software for, as you said, remote patient monitoring, virtual care, and digital medicine.
Our platform enables doctors and nurses to take better care of their patients outside the four walls of the clinic. And, you know, that's been in high demand in the last year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our mission is to make healthcare better for everyone. That means providers, doctors, and nurses, patients, and also even payers. Our biggest claim to fame is we're one of the winners of something called the QualcommTricorder XPRIZE competition. A lot of our new innovations come from that incredible three-year, $10 million innovation competition that we were co-winners of. We're one of very few Canadian companies who've ever made it to the finals of an XPRIZE, and I think still the only winner from the Canadian side, and so lot of our new technology was inspired by Star Trek!
SH: I briefly mentioned ‘The Connected Health Kit’ in the intro. Can you tell us about it in detail and what this means for the company and for potential shareholders moving forward?
RK: Absolutely. So the Connected Health Kit is really a set of tools, both hardware and software that make remote patient monitoring easy, convenient, and affordable. The kit itself consists of usually a tablet computer with our connected health mobile app already installed. Plus most often that a wrist cuff blood pressure device that I mentioned earlier plus maybe a weight scale, and a pulse oximeter of vital side devices that are also manufactured by Cloud DX. What happens is that patients take their vital signs on a regular schedule- sometimes once a day, sometimes a couple of times a week and they may also answer survey questions and communicate with physicians, clinicians, doctors, and nurses by two-way video, and even by text messaging. Meanwhile, a clinician, even a single clinician, can monitor hundreds of patients simultaneously and they're using our clinical dashboard, our web-based portal. So as you mentioned at the beginning, when you first described what we do, we're looking for those changes in vital signs, changes in symptoms, that might indicate that a patient has deteriorated or they're getting into trouble. If necessary, then the clinician can take steps to intervene, and that could be the booking of a video call, adjust medication all the way up to rolling an ambulance. So it's a very powerful, fully connected model of care that both patients and physicians really like.
SH: Heath and bio-tech stocks have been doing very well of late. Can you tell our investor audience what kind of financial verticals they can expect from Cloud DX moving forward?
RK: Yeah. Where it's very important to know we are a B2B and B2G company, at this point We sell the hospitals, large clinics, even provincial governments, and we're focused on reimbursed remote patient monitoring services, which are in high demand due to the massive increase in virtual care that's happened over the past year. So there's really four channels of growth that we're focused on going forward in the next little while. The first one is that in our existing contracts (and we have since 2020, we've seen a massive increase in the amount of business we've done), those existing contracts grow organically. So, clients like the province or for example the government of Yukon, which is a territory that we're a sole provider of virtual care for, theyhey often find new things to use our technology for so they're constantly adding patients and adding new use cases to what they're purchasing from us that generates organic growth within each contract.
Also, obviously we're aggressively growing our sales team and we're increasing our marketing spend so we're adding new contracts as fast as we can, all the time. Third though, is that we're bringing three new products to market in the next, roughly 24 months. These are innovations that we've been working on for years. We have a new version of that wrist cuff that I first described that is called “Pulase Wave 2.0) We also have a wearable continuous vital sign monitor born from that Tricorder competition called Vitality. And then also from the Tricorder we have a revolutionary software app that we're bringing to market that actually detects respiratory diseases based on the sound of a person coughing, that is in full-scale clinical validation right now. So, new products like these each have potentially multi-billion-dollar addressable markets. As we bring a new product to market and launch that product, we expect to see a much bigger increase in our revenue in that quarter and moving forward. And then the final point to make is that up until now, we've really been focused on North America, all of our customers are in Canada or the United , but virtual care is blowing up all over the world. So it's very clear to us that there are a lot of international opportunities here as well that we can start taking advantage of. So really that's four different opportunities for growth, and as they all come together and start to synergize, it gets very exciting.
SH: How do you plan on generating consistent cashflow?
RK: Well, that's a great question. So as a B2B and B2G company, we tend to sign stable long-term contracts, multi-year contracts with large, large, large players, either huge hospital groups, entire provinces, governments... As each contract gets signed, patients get added over time, so each contract has a sort of built-in growth curve inside of it. What that really means is we have a fair amount of growth baked into all of our existing business, add to that new contracts, new devices, new markets, and the possibilities for consistent increases in growth over time become very real.
SH: Dr. Mohamed Panju, site chief for Hamilton Ontario Health Sciences says that, “Virtual care and remote home monitoring are game changers when it comes to how we care for patients.” How is this a game-changer for companies like Cloud DX?
RK: Well, the game is indeed changing. Once they try it, patients really like virtual care. It gives them a role to play in the success of their own recovery or staying well, it's also a lot more convenient from the patient point of view than getting into your car, getting to a doctor's office, waiting in a waiting room full of a whole bunch of other sick people, taking a whole half day off work, just to spend 10 minutes with a doctor, which is the status quo. But clinicians really love virtual care too-it gives them superpowers. They get a chance to really see how their patients are doing in real time, which they otherwise simply cannot do. And so they get to see more, they get to produce better outcomes and it's more efficient. They get to care for more people with the same resources.So, you know, we're known for three things, we're an innovation leader with clearly differentiated products and services, we're nimble, which means we can deliver custom features very quickly, and we offer outstanding customer service. That is one of our claims to fame. So for us, this is how we're changing the game.
SH: Tell us about the problems you solve in the connected healthcare space specifically?
RK: Yes, absolutely. Virtually every other connected health company uses off the shelf medical devices when it comes to gathering those vital signs, and these are devices that were not necessarily designed for remote patient monitoring or for virtual care. Because we invent and manufacture our own unique, vital sign devices AND the patient facing app that the patient uses, AND and the clinical dashboard, we control the entire virtual care user experience from end to end. Wewe can make each part work better. We can make it work better with all the others, we can deliver superior products and services, and we can do that more affordably. No other company in our space does that quite the way we do, and it's been a real advantage. So in a couple of words, really what we can offer is seamless optimized customer experience.
SH: Robert, simply put, what are the company’s near-term objectives?
RK: You know, as you mentioned we're planning to list the company on the Toronto Venture Exchange, and we continue to advocate for more virtual care for Canadians, and we see that all the provinces are showing tremendous interest in all things virtual care right now, but our real focus actually is, in the near term, is in the United States. Over 50 million Americans qualify for fully reimbursed virtual care and remote patient monitoring for chronic illness. That's an enormous available market right in our backyard. So we're adding salespeople, we're increasing marketing, we're enlarging our Brooklyn facility to handle more throughput of our connected health kits and of course, as I mentioned earlier, we have three new products coming to market so bringing those products out into the world is a huge priority for us.
SH: How are you building your company in this competitive healthcare space?
RK: You know, I firmly believe that every company’s success depends first and foremost on their people. We've been extremely fortunate, in attracting amazing, amazing people and I want to actually send a shout out to some of my team right now. I want to send a shout out to our CFO, Stephanie Bird, our head of software Nick Mulder, our head of R&D Sara Ross-Howe, our people and talent team led by Erin Robbins, our marketing team led by Amanda Balla and our operations team led by Cara McDonald, along with my co-founders Anthony Kaul and Sonny Kohli. We're able to attract some of the best and brightest right now because of our mission and a fact that we really are making healthcare better for everyone, and we're very proud of that.
SH: If there’s anything else you’d like to add, or think is important, please feel free to elaborate?
RK: I just want to reiterate what you said at the top, which is that virtual care and digital medicine are here to stay. They're expected to be one of the fastest growing sectors all across the entire world in the next five or six years, because they fill a huge need, a need for care that's more humane, more convenient, but also more affordable. And I just want to say, we're tremendously excited to be part of that, and we're looking forward to the next stage of our growth.
For more information, visit
www.clouddx.com
FULL DISCLOSURE: This is a paid article produced by Stockhouse Publishing.