We recently had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Hubert Wong, CEO, President, and Founder of WonderMD. WonderMD is a Canadian-based family-focused telemedicine app that helps families find pediatricians or child health care providers for their children while simplifying how they choose, schedule, connect, and rate their experiences. Read on to learn how Carbide’s tech-enabled service offering provided expert guidance and tailored solutions, helping WonderMD streamline its compliance journey and achieve essential security and regulatory goals in Ontario’s complex healthcare landscape.
Video transcript:
Tell us a bit about WonderMD and the problem you were looking to solve.
WonderMD is a technology company that tries to transform the health care system in Ontario, specifically for children and families. There are a lot of problems with the healthcare system that prevent people from accessing their doctor, connecting with their doctor, or scheduling with their doctor in a timely fashion. We use technology solutions to try to overcome a lot of these barriers, to make it easier for families and doctors alike.
So when you think about the user experience for a current patient or family that tries to see their doctor in Ontario, we can think of it as a little bit outdated, in the sense that if you wanted to get an appointment, you wanted to schedule, you would have to connect to a secretary, staff, or administration. They would schedule for you, and they would get to decide when you get to see your doctor.
So we look at that situation and say, there is probably a better example in other industries. Many other industries, for example, like Airbnb, Uber, OpenTable, where in those industries they revolutionized the system and it made the user experience much better and widely accessible to everybody. We look at it in the same way in the healthcare system in Ontario.
When you look at the healthcare system, there’s a lot of sensitive and private information. It is a highly regulated environment for meeting all security and regulatory requirements in the province of Ontario and to take care of patients is a very difficult thing. It’s not an easy thing for anybody to do. So we need to find a partner that really works with us and walks us through the experience so that we know that we can have a successful outcome.
Carbide is the partner that we found three years ago when we were searching across Canada looking for the right fit. And they’ve been a great partner through that journey, and we’re very happy to work with them.
Which features of the platform have been the most valuable for your team?
So one of the big strengths of the Carbide platform is that it allows you to reach across multiple security standards, such as ISO, SOC 2, in addition to some other standards that we require, such as the Ontario Health Standards, as well. Carbide distills that complex information and provides a single platform where we can interface with it without looking at multiple duplicating and overlapping regulations from a variety of interests.
What challenges did WonderMD face during the compliance process, and how did Carbide’s platform and Advisory Team help your team overcome them?
We are not ourselves security experts. It’s difficult to be experts in all fields; we’re generally healthcare and technology experts. Using that consulting service from Carbide has been instrumental because there’s a lot of language and a lot of nuances within the security and regulatory field, which are not necessarily specific to healthcare but are difficult to understand for people in my position. Carbide explains that to us word-by-word and guides us through the process to make sure that we understand what we’re doing and that we can actually achieve our goals.
We would not operate without our security requirements that we were able to attain because of Carbide. Security and regulatory compliance changes year by year at least, and it is basically a necessary feature of security and compliance. It is a responsive field. There are constant attacks. There are new attacks that occur all the time. And we have to respond in a way that makes sense.
One of the beautiful things about Carbide is that it is a flexible system. It can allow us to identify these concerns at an early stage, work with regulators, and meet compliance standards in a proper manner.
What advice would you give to other businesses seeking a solution for their security and compliance needs?
So, if you are new to the industry and you’re dealing with private and sensitive information, I would say do it right. Plan it from the beginning. Find a great partner that can actually work with you, that understands the system, that can work through the regulatory issues. And personally, I found Carbide to be a wonderful partner in that process, and I believe that it would work for many other organizations out there as well.
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