Taking cognitive training to the world
A small spend on Google AdWords led to a big payoff for a Takapuna-based healthcare technology company
Friday, April 23 2010 || Technology || BY Lesley Springall
In one year, staff at healthcare technology company Simtics had to move offices — twice. Such has been the growth fuelled by a partnership with a US-listed tertiary education provider, spurred by a $164 marketing decision. Now based in Takapuna, the Simtics office has room for 100 more staff — and it looks like it’s going to need it.
For chief executive Peter Vanderbeke, the deal between Simtics and education provider Career Education Corporation (CEC) was more about luck than judgment. In June 2008, Vanderbeke forked out $164 on Google AdWords to gain better visibility in Google searches. Before the first week was up, CEC had been in contact — it had been searching for a year for a company like Simtics. A development deal was nutted out over the next few months, and in March 2009 CEC took a 14% shareholding in its New Zealand partner.
CEC was looking for a company it could work with to create online medical training products. Together the companies have developed more than 40 different tools that package together traditional textbook references, text and video.
What made Simtics so unique was its ‘virtual reality cognitive simulator’ — an interactive, animated 3D program, which forces students to undertake tasks in the right order, using the right tools, in the right way, with the click of a mouse. It’s not like video; you can’t fall asleep in front of it, says Vanderbeke.
“Cognitive training is the glue that makes the education stick. It’s all very well being able to cut someone open, but you need to know what to do before it, what to do after it, and in case something goes wrong. That’s the thinking processes. The physical cutting is relatively simple; you can learn that on a pigskin.”
CEC issued a press release heralding its “revolutionary approach to delivering healthcare education” and its partnership with Simtics last month. The announcement was timed to coincide with the company’s full year results, showing how important it believes this new technology is, says Vanderbeke.
South African trauma surgeon George Oosthuizen saw a need to better utilise technology when training people in the health industry. Along with Auckland University professor and surgeon John Windsor and paediatrician and technology enthusiast Richard Bloxham, Oosthuizen founded Simtics (then called Go Virtual Medical) to tackle the issue in 2003. The startup was billeted at Auckland University incubator the Icehouse and raised more than $1 million to fund its growth. But despite its founders’ high hopes, their connections and the development of more than 20 products, Go Virtual Medical still hadn’t made a sale by late 2007 when Vanderbeke took the reins.
A former nuclear physicist from England, Vanderbeke had been persuaded out of retirement (and his charter boat plans) by Simtics’ investor Greg Sitters, a director of angel investment company Sparkbox. With 20 years in information technology behind him, Vanderbeke says he could see Simtics’ potential from day one.
Vanderbeke shored up the company with some more capital and spent his first few months nailing down the company’s first contracts in the UK.
The CEC partnership deal is worth upwards of $2.5 million a year to Simtics, says Vanderbeke, plus it keeps the rights to the training packages outside the US and for non-profit organisations, such as universities and hospitals.
Managing the company’s growth has been hard, he says, but the company has now taken on an international business development manager to follow up leads in China and Southeast Asia. It’s also growing in the UK, finally making inroads into the bureaucracy of England’s National Health Service. Vanderbeke expects the company to break even by November, and he is looking at other applications, outside the medical arena, for its technology — hence the name change.
“The platform technology is applicable to any process-driven activity,” says chairman David Bone. “If you wanted to teach people how to strip an AK-47, for instance, this would be the way to do it.”
