Damon Ramsey
Becoming one of the brightest young business minds in B.C. was never something UBC Faculty of Medicine alumnus Damon Ramsey set out to achieve.
“I haven’t told my parents yet,” admits the 29-year-old Vancouver-based family physician and business entrepreneur, recently named to BC Business’ 30 Under 30 list for 2016.
The prestigious designation — awarded to ‘young guns’ in their 20s who are not only excelling professionally but innovating their industry — won’t come as a surprise to those who know Dr. Ramsey.
“I think my friends and colleagues have always seen me as somewhat eccentric,” says the former UBC Family Medicine resident. “For me, it’s never been enough to go down the typical path. I’m always looking at how I can stretch boundaries, and go beyond what’s expected.”
It’s that energy and visionary approach to work — and life — that has led Dr. Ramsey to where he is today: co-founder and CEO of InputHealth, a software company looking to revolutionize the healthcare arena through patient-centered data collection and analysis.
“Every encounter that happens in the healthcare system is an opportunity to capture data, and improve patient engagement,” he says. “But oftentimes this is something that is fundamentally missing.”
Looking to technology to help fill the gap, Dr. Ramsey teamed up with fellow physicians, developers and designers to create software solutions that could more effectively capture and analyze patient data.
One of the company’s leading solutions, known as Collaborative Health Record (or CHR), is an electronic medical record platform. Yet, unlike other solutions that have come before it, CHR is not just a platform for clinicians, but also patients.
“This is a fundamental change,” says Dr. Ramsey. “Typically, medical records are not easy for patients to access, but with CHR, we’ve taken a patient-centered approach. We’re encouraging co-responsibility and co-ownership of a person’s healthcare on a technological level.”
Early adopters of the platform — which offers everything from e-booking services to automated patient intake interviews and virtual check-ins — are witnessing improvements.
“I spend a lot less time collecting information and a lot more time talking to patients,” says Matthew Chow, who helped found the tele-psychiatry program at BC Children’s Hospital, and uses the platform for everything from reaching out to patients, documenting visits, prescribing medications and sending out reports.
But Dr. Ramsey and his colleagues at InputHealth are not just aiming to improve collaboration and healthcare encounters at the clinician and patient-level. They’re also looking to affect change at the population-level, working with leading healthcare research institutions, including the Mayo Clinic.
“Using our software, large institutions will be able to easy collect and analyze large amounts of outcomes-based data, making it easier to offer value-based, and patient-centered care,” says Dr. Ramsey, who has a long-standing history and fascination with technology.
A screenshot of InputHealth’s digital questionnaire module, Qnaire.
Photo credit: InputHealth
In fact, at the age of 12, when most kids his age were busy collecting comic books, Dr. Ramsey — already a Microsoft-certified systems engineer — set up his own technology company, working as a network and software consultant, with clients based across Canada and the United States.
Destined for what he, and many others, thought would be a life-long career as a software engineer, Dr. Ramsey kicked off his university career at UBC, joining the innovative, interdisciplinary Cognitive Systems Program.
But less than a year after starting the program, Dr. Ramsey found himself at a crossroads.
“I really felt that I needed to pursue a career that could directly impact people’s lives,” says Dr. Ramsey, recalling how influential his parents’ journey to Canada during the Iranian Revolution was on his overall outlook, and understanding of the world.
“As a child, hearing their stories, I knew it wasn’t enough to just land a successful job. I had to somehow turn my career into something that would contribute to the larger world,” he says. “For that reason, medicine was very attractive.”
Looking to align his personal aspirations with his professional goals, Dr. Ramsey shifted focus and, at the age of 19, entered medical school at McMaster University, where the seed for InputHealth was first planted.
“During medical school, I had a lot of opportunity to observe patient-physician interactions, and, having that vantage point, seeing the situation from both sides, I started to recognize that better communication was needed,” recalls Dr. Ramsey.
After graduating from McMaster, Dr. Ramsey moved back to the west coast for Family Medicine residency at UBC. Over the course of the two-year program, he began to formulate, and formalize the blueprint for his company.
“The whole time I was in residency, I was feeling like I needed to innovate, needed to produce something,” he recalls.
By 2014, only four years after wrapping up residency, Dr. Ramsey had launched InputHealth, which has allowed him to marry his love of medicine with his passion for technology.
Today, as co-founder and CEO, he’ll be the first to admit that running a company, while working as a family physician, takes time, and careful balance.
“I’m working 16 to 18-hour days,” says Dr. Ramsey.
But moving away from his work as a family physician to open up more time to nurture his growing business is not in the plans.
“I’m going to continue practicing medicine my entire life. I think Family Medicine is incredibly rewarding work, and will allow me to continue contributing to people’s live in a very direct way, and may even help open up new doors as an entrepreneur,” he says.
In the decades to come, Dr. Ramsey hopes to see InputHealth change the landscape of digital health across North America.
It’s an ambitious goal and, given Dr. Ramsey’s previous track record, one well worth working towards.