Jean Manasse Theagene – CEO/President, 360Medlink.Inc
Our business at 360Medlink specializes in digital health and therapeutics. Although based in Canada, our sales are 99% international, therefore the impact of COVID19 was immediately felt shortly before Europe and Canada went into lockdown with travel restrictions.
And how we cope with it ?
Most important thing was to elevate our team members’ spirits by ensuring that each of them and their family members’ health and wellbeing was top priority. Especially for those with new babies and elderly parents at home.
For the business we were able to pivot from office work to working from home (WFH) completely for everyone. As an agile software company our staff members were already used to occasionally working from home. Unfortunately, due to client payment delays and reduction in sales we had to make some reductions to part-time and furlough a few positions. While production continued, productivity was affected.
Our main challenge was to maintain operations and avoid any disruption in client projects. Thankfully, I have an extraordinary team with great competence, dedication, and passion! With the help of the government economic wage subsidy (CEWS), we managed to keep enough resources employed while optimizing our use of available liquidity. Contrarily to most small digital health companies, we are self-funded therefore good cashflow management is paramount to growth.
We have heard of other economic aids from both federal and provincial governments but aside from the CEWS we have not benefited from any. Surely, the subsidy for office rent would be very helpful.
I believe for our company the two most positive things we have learned during the past 2 weeks of the impact of COVID19 on business:
- First, our product TAVIE the digital treatment companion app for patients, has gained more success in helping patients’ lives. Especially after we included a “COVID19 Response” feature in the App for our main US client the HHS (Health and Human Services) for the state of Rhode Island.
- Second, it is now clear that digital health and remote care is here to stay. Considering our expertise of the domain, our products and international presence the future is looking very bright!
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