Robert Horvath is a self-professed tech nerd. He also happens to be a doctor.
And what happens when a tech nerd becomes an emergency physician? He quickly realizes that paper scheduling, which is still widely used in many emergency rooms, is not the way to go.
"The amount of effort it would take to arrange changes was ridiculous," says Dr. Horvath, an emergency physician at Toronto's North York General Hospital and assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Toronto. "You could call 10 people just to ask a favour to change one shift, and half the time the paper schedule was out of date anyway."
Tired of the rigmarole he faced every time he wanted to trade, Dr. Hovarth enlisted a fellow doctor and a programmer to help him do something about it. "[We] built a system that showed a calendar with all the shifts of your colleagues," he says.
Staff members can see their own schedules and the schedules of those in their department. When they need to make a switch, they send an e-mail to members of their group. If a colleague accepts, the master schedule is automatically updated. Dr. Horvath calls it the eBay of physician scheduling: "It brings together the buyers and sellers."
Dr. Horvath and his partners forked over $30,000 to get their Internet-based staff scheduling software, which they called DocRoster, off the ground. At the time, he knew of only one potential competitor: EPSKED out of the United States, which didn't allow shift trading but instead was downloaded software designed to generate schedules.
North York General agreed to let Dr. Horvath test his new application in their emergency room as a pilot program in 2001, at no cost to the hospital.
The software cut the work of the administrative person responsible for the schedule in half, Dr. Horvath says. It also increased accountability because there was no confusion about who should be in for a certain shift.
"At the end of the year we went to the hospital and said, someone has to start paying for this," Dr. Horvath says. "They took a vote and it was a unanimous decision to continue using it." With their first paying client on board, Dr. Horvath and his partners incorporated Rosterware.
Nalin Ahluwalia, former chief of emergency medicine at York Central Hospital in Richmond Hill, Ont., and currently an emergency physician at Oakville Trafalgar Memorial Hospital, likes the software for its ease of access. "If you're outside of the country, you can still access your schedule and make changes without a lot of headache," he says.
He recalls that when York Central introduced DocRoster, physicians were at first reluctant. "We all know people are resistant to change," he says. But within a few weeks, the staff was convinced. "They would never go back," he says, calling DocRoster a leading innovation in the medical work space.
In the years after they launched DocRoster, Dr. Horvath and his partners invested an additional $80,000. By 2006, about 30 hospital groups were using the software. But the approximate $10 fee per doctor per month they were charging (plus a licensing fee) just wasn't cutting it. Rosterware needed a serious injection of capital.
"We knew we'd never be able to take it to the next level without investment and partnership," Dr. Horvath says.
He came close to inking partnership deals twice, but both times they fell through. In one case, Dr. Horvath spent more than a year in negotiations only to decide that the partnership wasn't a good fit. "I should have defined my needs first and then found people to fit those needs," he says.
In 2008, Dr. Horvath contemplated selling the business. That's when he learned about the Innovation Synergy Centre in Markham, an Ontario-based non-profit organization geared toward helping small and mid-sized businesses grow, including finding investments.
