Medimap it: Clinic and pharmacy finder platform wants to be the Google of healthcare

Need to know planet Jupiter’s circumference? Google it. Want to help a patient find a physiotherapist in the neighbourhood? Vancouver’s Medimap Systems Inc., hopes you’ll forego the world’s most popular search engine in favour of its clinic locator platform. “Our goal is to establish Medimap as the go-to place for any type of care in your community,” said Blake Adam, the company's founder and CEO. “We’d like to get to the point where Medimap becomes a verb: You’ve hurt your back? Pulled a muscle? Let’s Medimap it.” When it was launched in June 2015, Medimap’s online site focused solely on helping patients find the closest walk-in clinics through a platform that provided site location, hours of operation and updated wait time information. In February 2021 Medimap started to expand its platform to include family physicians accepting new patients as well as allied healthcare providers such as physiotherapists, massage therapists, chiropractors, mental health professionals, audiologists and alcohol treatment specialists. Read: How do different provinces stack up on walk-in clinic wait times? Today, the service lists more than 1,200 clinics—including more than 500 allied healthcare practices—in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Saskatchewan. More than 6 million Canadians have used the platform to find a clinic and book an appointment since June 2015. Adam said Medimap has also started to add pharmacists to the platform, with a focus on clinical services such as smoking cessation and weight loss. “Like the way Amazon started with books, we first had this narrow vision of establishing a go-to place for Canadians when they needed access to a walk-in clinic,” he said. “The original goal was to give these clinics an easy way to put their wait times online and be able to share with their patients if they’ve closed for the day because they’re at capacity. But we were hearing about all these orphan patients bouncing from clinic to clinic, so we started to also include clinics that were taking new patients and then expanded to include allied health services. “Ultimately we want to give Canadians a one-stop shop to compare all healthcare clinics in their community.” Read: London Drugs using Medimap platform to provide virtual consultations with doctors in-pharmacy To make it easy for users to find what they need, Medimap provides the option of filtering search results with parameters such as type of visit—in-person, phone or video—language and proximity to the patient. Patients can also search the site based on their health complaint and compare from a list of practitioners. With some walk-in clinics, Medimap also allows patients to check in online and join a virtual queue. “With Medimap, you put in your location, select the service you’re looking for and it searches the community for real-time availability,” said Adam. “This real-time availability is what’s unique to the platform, and it’s people Medimap to find care as opposed to Google.” Patients aren’t the only ones who benefit from the service, he added. Clinics can operate more efficiently when patients can find the information they need ahead of a visit. “We’ve found that in a lot of clinics, reception staff are inundated with calls all day about wait times and questions like what time does the clinic close,” said Adam. “For primary care clinics, the main reason we hear for wanting to sign up with Medimap is it helps them level off patent flow and it reduces stress on staff and medical assistants, who no longer have to worry about a parent showing up and pounding on the door at closing time and expecting to be seen.” Primary care physicians are also increasingly using Medimap to find and refer specialists within a convenient distance to their patients, said Adam. Read: How do Canadian patients feel about virtual walk-in clinics?

Medimap it: Clinic and pharmacy finder platform wants to be the Google of healthcare

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