An award winning local business is hoping to spread its wings into the United States and Europe in 2017.
MetricAid, based in downtown North Bay, uses an algorithm to match predicted volumes of patients arriving in the emergency department with the performance of the department and individual physicians.
“We have been really focused the last couple of years on Ontario so we’ve implemented our solution obviously here in North Bay, just started in Sudbury and many hospitals in the GTA,” stated Co-founder Les Blackwell in an interview back in December.
“We will be in other major cities in the New Year.”
The North Bay high-tech medical firm currently employs a dozen workers at their head office based here in North Bay.
The company was named the Innovation and Environment Business of the Year by the North Bay & District Chamber of Commerce back in October of 2016.
Blackwell says they are looking at a very aggressive scale-up in the next two years.
“We are working on some deals in the US right now and should have our first US client in early 2017 and we will be looking at some European markets - Scandinavia and northern Europe in late 2017,” he said.
Blackwell and co-founder Dr. Scott Daley, built the business on the response to what Blackwell says was a real scheduling problem at the North Bay Regional Health Centre.
“So basically we deployed the solution in 2011, our wait times dropped dramatically, the hospital won an award for that system and then not long after other hospitals were asking Scott and I to deploy it there so we incorporated MetricAid and started hiring developers and now we hire schedulers and other staff as well,” he said.
Despite the fact that the business is growing to markets far away from North Bay, Blackwell says the business will grow right from its roots here in North Bay.
“A lot of our staff here are from the area, many are ex-pats that came back to work at MetricAid and moved up from the city and some from further afield,” said Blackwell.
“North Bay is a great place to do business, certainly a great place to raise a family and we have lots of new Canadians in the shop as well that are enjoying their experience with the company and in northern Ontario.”
He says MetricAid takes pride in what they hope will be more very good paying jobs to North Bay in the near future.
“The jobs that we offer here are typically the types of jobs you would find in the GTA so I’m happy to say we’ve reversed the flow a little bit of these jobs and these people leaving the north to go and take them down south and instead we have northerners and people from southern Ontario and around the world, in fact, that are coming to North Bay to work for this company and to buy houses and start families so it’s great that we’ve been able to turn that around.”
