they didn't add doctors, they removed the waiting

friday morning i taped an episode with a professor in ontario who co-founded a virtual care platform with three friends. he was in india for diwali when we recorded. first time back in thirty years, he said.

his starting point was one sentence. healthcare delayed is healthcare denied.

he told me what pushed them to build it. during covid, seniors were locked in care homes with almost no access to a doctor. and after one emergency room visit, the follow up with a family doctor was three weeks out.

three weeks, for a follow up.

here's what i want you to notice about how they fixed it, because it applies far beyond healthcare.

they didn't find more doctors. they didn't create more hours in a day. they went after the wasted time.

no phone calls to book. no hold music. no tag between the clinic and the patient. rescheduling happens automatically. alerts go both ways, so the doctor and the patient both know where things stand. a patient books at six in the evening, and by ten past six a pharmacist is calling about the prescription, delivered or picked up.

the doctor's time didn't grow. the waste around it shrank.

he also told me they brought doctors in from day one, five or six of them shaping the product, and later mba students who thought about how normal people would actually use it. nurse practitioners now add hours too, and they're adding evenings and weekends. the technical team built it. the people closest to the patient told them what to build.

most founders i talk to try to fix capacity by adding capacity. more people, more hours, more spend. sometimes that's the answer. but in almost every system there's a pile of dead time sitting between the steps. waiting. handoffs. somebody calling somebody to confirm something a computer already knows.

that's where ai and plain software win first. not by replacing the expert. by removing everything around the expert that isn't expert work.

the other part of his story i loved was how they reach people. they've put clinics into remote villages in ontario, inside pharmacies, with an assistant there to help older patients get on the call. this summer he travelled with students to find where the gaps were. the tech works fine for someone with a laptop and good wifi. the hard part is the last few metres to the person who has neither.

that's a go to market lesson hiding inside a health story. your product isn't done when it works. it's done when the person who needs it most can actually use it.

he leaned hard on one more thing. keeping patient data in canada, encrypted, owned by the patient. he sees sovereignty over health data as a reason to grow, not just a compliance box. i think he's right. trust is the product in anything that touches your health or your money. i learned that in bitcoin. once people stop trusting where their stuff lives, nothing else you build matters.

he said something at the end i didn't expect. for him, building this is about carrying your country's honour. it's not just about money.

long term, the biggest wins from ai won't be the flashy ones. they'll be the three week wait that becomes three days. the phone call that never had to happen. the dead time that quietly disappears.

more on where i think ai creates real value, not just demos, is in the ai book.

so map one process in your company step by step... how much of it is the work, and how much is the waiting?