Founder Spotlight
We share our members’ achievements; the challenges they overcame, and the advice they want women entrepreneurs everywhere to know.
Empowered by
Meet Loreen Wales, Founder, Revive Wellness and My Viva Plan. After 10 years in the public health sector working as a dietitian, Wales understood the frustrations patients felt as they struggled to manage complex chronic health conditions within a siloed care system.
After building a private practice, Revive Wellness, and struggling to meet the needs of her growing list of patients, Wales turned to the power of technology to help bring comprehensive, personalized care to the masses.
Read on for our Founder Spotlight interview with Loreen.
Meet Loreen Wales, Founder, Revive Wellness and My Viva Plan. After 10 years in the public health sector working as a dietitian, Wales understood the frustrations patients felt as they struggled to manage complex chronic health conditions within a siloed care system. After building a private practice, Revive Wellness, and struggling to meet the needs of her growing list of patients, Wales turned to the power of technology to help bring comprehensive, personalized care to the masses.
What motivated you to embark on your entrepreneurial journey?
I had always been interested in nutrition so I decided to pursue that along with psychology in university. That led me to specialize in nephrology, which focuses on people living with kidney disease, and I began my career in the public sector. My second week on the job, I was part of a team at a transplant teaching class, and when I introduced myself as the dietitian, there was so much frustration and anger directed toward me from the patients—people I had never met before or treated in my life. When I returned to the class the next month, it happened again with a new crop of patients. It was a shocking experience, and so troubling that I thought about quitting. But before I did that I decided I would attend the class one more time to see if these were just two anomalies. Unfortunately it happened again.
I needed to figure out what was going on, so I decided to reach out to these patients and try to figure out where these emotions were coming from. One by one they shared how frustrated they were with the system because of all of the contradictory information from different healthcare professionals. They felt overwhelmed and weren’t sure who they should listen to. I remember feeling so disheartened but ready to make a difference.
I’ve always used a patient-centric approach to my care. After 10 years of being in the public sector, doing research and program development—learning from the patients living with these multiple chronic health conditions and the challenges they face—I wanted to get to the other side of the illness and focus on prevention. That’s when I jumped into private practice and started our Edmonton clinic in 2006, Revive Wellness.
Later on you launched a second business, My Viva Plan. How did that happen?
Two problems consistently came up in the tertiary and primary care worlds. One, there were more patients than healthcare professionals, so the waitlists to receive care were long. Trying to figure out how we could be as efficient as possible within the clinic setting was a big issue. The second issue was the challenge of supporting my patients in managing their health at home. All I had was paper resources, some websites and my own recommendations to share with patients. To build something comprehensive and personalized for people living with complex health conditions would take two to four hours, but was next to impossible to do given our limited resources and time in the clinic setting.
After a long brainstorming session with our Communications Director, Callie, we had an epiphany—technology would help us solve these problems. Our team would be able to provide evidence-based, comprehensive and personalized care to the masses, and that’s how My Viva Plan was born.
How did you develop My Viva Plan?
I bootstrapped it for four years through my clinic. I had no experience in tech—absolutely none—so the first few iterations of our program weren’t great, but you’ve got to start somewhere, right? Ultimately in 2015, I decided if I was really going to do this, I would need some help. I hired an engineer, and together we built the program from scratch. It took a lot of work, all beginning from my pages and pages of notes in some coil notebooks. But together we were able to build this program and database—and here’s the crazy thing. We started in 2015 and built our first desktop version in just four months. And then, in 2016 we created a mobile responsive platform, which was kind of ahead of its time. Everyone was so focused on apps at the time, but apps were taking up too much storage space on smart devices.
How did your private practice clinic support the development of My Viva Plan?
All the experiences that healthcare professionals in my office had with patients in my clinic went into building our program. The bricks and mortar clinic is our living lab which has been so critical. When you're using technology to solve patient problems and to support healthcare professionals, you need that lab setting. You need to build it based on what the patient's needs are and what the healthcare professional needs are, so that is its benefit and beauty. When we started building the tech, we knew it had to be comprehensive—it considers the whole patient, body and mind because mental and physical health are so interconnected. You can’t have one without the other, and that’s really the foundation of My Viva Plan.
How did you grow and scale My Viva Plan?
Initially we had been targeting employer health plans but it was proving to be a challenge. That prompted a shift in focus to the healthcare space. We fully integrated the program into our living lab, Revive Wellness, documenting everything and mapping out the whole process and application, and proved it out. We increased revenue on the tech side by embedding it into the clinical practice. From there, we started building a list of dietitians across the country and began integrating into clinics. And then, poof, the pandemic hit.
How did the pandemic affect your journey?
It shut down the clinic. Overnight business dropped 95 percent. It was devastating; from having to furlough my employees to the effects it had on mental health and, of course, the millions of lives lost. But it did help people embrace technology in the healthcare space. Suddenly everybody was told to stay home, and we had to use virtual care. Well, we already had everything set up. We didn't have to change a single thing in our day-to-day practice because we were fully digitalized. We had electronic charting. We had virtual care. The only difference for our patients as they weren’t coming into the office anymore. We were ahead of the curve.
What’s on the horizon now for My Viva Plan?
My ultimate goal is to be integrated into this bigger healthcare ecosystem.We spent the time to build the tech and do a deep dive on creating the algorithms, with the ability to automate the creation of care plans, which nobody else has done. I’m thinking a lot about building strategic partnerships and so over this last year, the focus has been on getting into the largest tech health tech ecosystem, and build those partnerships within that space at the same time, we’re scaling and integrating into other primary care clinics across Canada, along with pharmacies across Canada because they do a lot of primary care.
What advice would you give to other founders in our network?
I think it’s so important to map out your core values because as you start to build your team you want to have a very clear understanding of those values. It’s also important to sit down and look at what your strengths are and weaknesses are and to be really brave and honest with yourself about what they are, and then seek out the consultants or mentors who can help fill in those gaps.
Thank you Loreen for your contribution to the CWN community. This Founder Spotlight was brought to you by OBIO.
The Ontario Bioscience Innovation Organization (OBIO®) founded in 2009, is a not-for-profit, membership-based organization engaged in strategy, programming, policy development and advocacy to further the commercialization of Canadian human health technologies positioning Canada as a leader in the international marketplace. OBIO’s Women in Health Initiative (WiHI) ensures the career success of participating women in the health science industry by drawing on our in-house training expertise and extensive network of professionals, advisors and companies.
