Osama Usmani for Salubrum

Salubrum makes medical tourism safe and affordable. We connect patients with trusted providers, offer digital tools for seamless travel, and use precise US patient data for targeted solutions. Join us in solving healthcare affordability by building the Expedia of medical tourism!

Hi Everyone,

The team at Salubrum is excited to bring you another update for the months of March and April. It has been a very busy time for us as we prepared for the start of NEXT36's (https://www.nextcanada.com/) summer cohort, which started as of May 7th. We will be working out of 181 Bloor St. in Toronto, so if your in the area feel free to connect!

As you can see we have transitioned our monthly updates to Paperstreet and will continue to use the service moving forward. With that out of the way lets get into it!

• In the month of March and April Salubrum:
  • Improved upon our Travelwise Passport MVP by integrating the ability to purchase procedures through our partnered provider Quironsalud (https://international.quironsalud.com/).
  • This ability to 'sell' procedures comes in time for us to convert on our marketing spend through our new GTM partner in Definitive Healthcare (https://www.definitivehc.com/).
  • We have officially contracted the services of Lori Jennings (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lori-jennings-49738727/), who will be helping us develop our offering for payers and do a little business development. We are very excited to welcome her to our mission!
  • Salubrum secures its first major investment of $50,000 USD through a SAFE.
  • Artest Management Group (https://artestmanagementgroup.com/) will be conducting a roadshow spotlighting their Toronto based portfolio. Salubrum will be welcoming AMG to the city June 17-22nd.
  • Salubrum will be attending Collision Conference 2024 (https://collisionconf.com/), June 17th-20th in downtown Toronto.
  • Salubrum is featured as part of the BETA program for startups.
  • As part of the NEXT36 program Salubrum is excited to welcome as mentors:
    • Nima Ayat (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nimaayat/) and
    • Leslie Jamison (https://www.linkedin.com/in/leslie-jamison-1aa26b/)

Further details on each announcement can be found below.

• Shoutout to Marta (https://www.linkedin.com/in/martamuriscot/), for being a great partner and point of contact at Quironsalud. Her passion for global healthcare and her belief in us was major reason for Salubrum getting the contract to begin with, but is also a driving factor in them being available and helpful.
• Shoutout to Thadd (https://www.linkedin.com/in/thaddchastain/), for being so helpful as Salubrum and Definitive Healthcare negotiate terms. Thadd has not only done a great job of articulated the value DH brings to Salubrum, but has helped us reach terms friendly to an early stage startup.
• Huge shout out to Lori (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lori-jennings-49738727/), for joining us in our mission to make medical tourism mainstream. Lori is a seasoned industry insider who has the ear of multiple decision makers in the payer space in NA, and is the type of person to only work on projects she's passionate about. We are super grateful to bring Lori on board and know her industry experience and deep network will be essential in Salubrum's goals for the payer market.
• Special shoutout to Julie (https://www.linkedin.com/in/julie-brown-georgi/), who joined our team 2.5 yrs ago as an advisor to HealthPass. Since this transition from school project to startup began, Julie has been instrumental in helping us craft our business model, market and compliance and she has stuck with us through the ups and downs that come with the Founder journey. As I prepared to graduate and take things full time, Julie joined the core team as our Chief Compliance Officer (linkedin post here), and has since taken on a very hands on role in our success, the best example of this is her creation of our MVP for the Salubrum Standards and her ongoing building of the Salubrum Whitepaper. Julie now joins us as our very first Angel investor, having invested $50k USD of her own funds into the project. Her dedication to Salubrum is a testament to the strength of our team, as Julie is a well connected industry expert with over 25 yrs of experience, but also to the strength of our solution, with more and more industry experts seeing the viability of Salubrum.
• Shoutout to Magen (https://www.linkedin.com/in/magen-baker/), who has been super helpful in managing logistics for the AMG Toronto roadshow, and making sure that Salubrum is spotlighted and included in the best way possible, thank you!
• Shoutout to Charles (https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-wagstaff/), who has been a great point of contact at Collision, helping coordinate a last second speaking engagement for AMG but also helping Salubrum secure stage time and stay involved. Having advocates when dealing with such large event organizers is always nice and Charles has gone above and beyond to help us out, thank you!
• Finally huge shout out to the entire NEXT Canada Team (https://www.nextcanada.com/) for taking care of us and welcoming us to Toronto!
  • Shout out to Mischa (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mischahamara/) for being an advisor, mentor and friend!
  • Shout out to Fletcher (https://www.linkedin.com/in/fletcher-mclaughlin-847591208/) for being ana amazing point of contact and support system.
  • Shout out to Reza (https://www.linkedin.com/in/reza-satchu/) for putting together an amazing program for amazing people!
  • Shout out to Daniel (https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielbenin/), for being our referral to the program and for continuing to mentor us through his involvement as an EIR at NEXT.

Lets start with the Travelwise Passport.

As mentioned in earlier updates, Salubrum will be investing in a marketing budget this summer which is detailed below. That being said it was essential for us to have the product ready to go. The updated MVP is ready and completed and can be accessed here (https://www.salubrum.com/), we invite everyone to make an account and check things out! 🌎

As of today the Travelwise Passport can:

• Provide price comparisons and insights (internal database).
• Travel/Stay through Expedia integration (https://www.expedia.ca/)
• Short term medical coverage through partnership with Global Protective Solutions (https://www.globalprotectivesolutions.com/)
• HSA/FSA payment capabilities (https://www.withflex.com/)
• Selling of procedures/retrieving of quotes through partnership with Quironsalud (https://international.quironsalud.com/)

Secondly lets take a look at our Payer offering for commercial healthplans, the Salubrum Preferred Provider Network (PPN) 🔐:

• As mentioned in earlier updates Salubrum has been exploring the idea evangelizing the North American healthcare system to medical tourism. We wanted to address:
  • Interoperability Concerns: Most medical tourism experiences are a complete black hole from the payer experience with EMRs never making it back.
  • Disruption in the Care Journey: Due to the cash-pay model of medical tourism wherein most patients pay using a credit card rather than a health card, patients rarely consult their primary physician and/or TPA. Patients are left to make uninformed decisions that take them out of network.
  • Continuity of Care: In most cases of medical tourism, patients face ostracization and are rejected from their primary care physician or specialist. We spoke to a woman who's husband had traveled to India for cataract surgery but upon return was unable to receive check ups from local doctors who refused to deal with a care incident outside of network.
• In order to address these problems we wanted to provide a product that would include:
  • Turnkey engagement platform: The digital solution bolts onto existing systems and can engage target patient populations quickly & effectively.
  • Interoperable data exchange: Data from procedures performed abroad return to the US in a secure, structured, digital format.
  • Salubrum standards and credentials: Salubrum Standards ensure providers are credentialed, experienced, & trustworthy.
  • Quality care at accessible prices: Patients choose among vetted, high-quality providers and shop affordable procedures.
  • Expand excellent service across Geos: Payers provided greater access through an innovative value-based solution.
• After consulting our advisors, mentors and the former National Medical Director at Optum, Alex (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-mohseni-md-facep-2142b87/), we settled on the fact that by wrapping medical tourism around a Value Based Care framework, we could offer all the benefits as mentioned above, in a framework that is digestable for the commercial health plans we are targeting.
• In order to help us work through this endeavour both in terms of defining the offering as well as securing our first few payers we have enlisted the help of Lori Jennings (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lori-jennings-49738727/), who will be working with us May, June and July to:
  • Develop and maintain relationships with decision-makers in the health insurance sectors
  • Secure letters of intent from health insurers, demonstrating their interest in and intention to explore business opportunities with Salubrum.
  • Provide regular progress updates detailing targets, engagements, outcomes, and any strategic recommendations for the development of B2B client profiles, PMF fit/pull and latent market opportunities.
  • VBC Framework / Product Strategy.
  • Product Market-Fit Optimization for payer offering.

Finally, lets take a look at our Provider offering; the Salubrum Lead Generation Framework.

• As mentioned in earlier updates, the medical tourism industry is going through a bit of a crisis period. The reason for this is historically, the lead generation done by our competitors such as Medical Tourism.com (https://www.medicaltourism.com/) took heavy advantage of the Google Ads framework, securing keywords for top dollar and charging smaller clinics as a sort of 'yellow pages' for clinics. However, Google announced an overhaul to the Ads framework seeing the removal of cookies (https://blog.google/products/chrome/privacy-sandbox-tracking-protection/), which means a significant impact on the lead generation model of our competitors.
• After doing some more research we found that the international providers that relied on our competitors for lead generation were looking for alternatives. Following on the mission of making 'medical tourism mainstream', we looked into ways we could:
  • Upstream medical tourism: Means bringing medical tourism as a solution to potential patients much earlier in the decision making process.
  • Leverage Direct Marketing Channels: We wanted to do more than just digital marketing and give international providers the same treatment that domestic providers received in terms of direct mail/email, programmatic advertising, local media and print media.
• Earlier this year we came across Definitive Healthcare (https://www.definitivehc.com/). DH was not only the number one source for healthcare datasets, but they're marketing engine is also what feeds Mayo Clinic and Cedars Sinai. We met with Thadd (https://www.linkedin.com/in/thaddchastain/) during our trip to LA for VIVE 2024, and explained our ambitions for owning and enhancing the medical tourism vertical. We are glad to announce that we will be partnering with Definitive Healthcare to build out our hyper targeted marketing engine!
  • Though we are working out pricing, scope and timeline we hope to turn on the tap for a 3- month marketing campaign June 2024.
  • A deck explaining DH's capabilities and services in more detail will be attached.
• This partnership is a game changer for the marketing of medical tourism in North America, we will be the first to offer such a comprehensive and hyper targeted lead generator for international providers. Quironsalud and other such international providers are very keen to improve their lead generation methods and move their offering upstream, approaching patients with the option of medical tourism through the same channels and earlier in the care journey.

As we have continued our learnings with NEXT Canada, we have evolved our thinking around Product and GTM/S to go from simply looking at Product + Market fit, to Product + Market + Model + Channel fit. This framework gives a much more in depth analysis of the success of a business model and forces us to address the needs of strong channels, pricing models and segmentation. You can find more on the PMMC framework here: https://brianbalfour.com/essays/product-market-fit-isnt-enough

Recent examples of this in action are:

• Our partnership with Definitive Healthcare, which is a Channel that provides us with a competitive advantage. By providing us with hyper-targeted data on potential medical tourists, they allow us to increase conversions, lower the overall Cost of Acquisition and give us a defensible differentiator.
• Our hiring of Lori, serves as a catalyst to developing a successful Model for the payer segment, and serves as a great Channel helping us shop our solution to payer decision makers who are otherwise difficult to access.

• We lost our CTO Ayman (https://www.linkedin.com/in/aymanshaikh/) to a promotion at TELUS and the subsequent golden handcuffs. This has of course put a strain on our productivity in the short term but the team is confident we will be able to address the gaps quickly.
• We have parted ways our COO Rahul (https://www.linkedin.com/in/rahuljainpmp/) due to culture fit issues, and wish him nothing but the best.
• Due to the parting of these team members the deployment of our website for May is uncertain, we have pushed our launch date to June 2024.

As of May 2024 we have:

• Secured $50,000 USD in hard commitments
• Secured $30,000 USD in wire transfer
• Have $20,000 USD in pipeline

and are spending:

• $30,000 over 3 mos – Contractor: Lori Jennings (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lori-jennings-49738727/)
  • Develop and maintain relationships with decision-makers in the health insurance sectors
  • Secure a minimum of two letters of intent from health insurers, demonstrating their interest in and intention to explore business opportunities with Salubrum.
  • Provide regular progress updates detailing targets, engagements, outcomes, and any strategic recommendations for the development of B2B client profiles, PMF fit/pull and latent market opportunities.
• $25,000-$50,000 over 1 yr – Definitive Health (https://www.definitivehc.com/)- *negotiations in progress*
  • Dashboard Access – Population Insights, Geographic Analysis, etc.
  • Digital Activation - Email outreach, Programmatic Activation, Physician Programmatic costs.
  • Managed Campaign Activation Services.
  • Deck attached.
• $1,500/month –Technology APIs (e.g. Flex Health, etc.)
• $2,500 on time payment – Collision Conference Presence
• $6,000 over 1 yr, *not yet spent* – Client development: meeting with business partners, potential providers, and payers to advance business development discussions (possible travel/conference expenses).

and are filling the rest of our $100k USD pre-seed round at the following terms:

• As mentioned before we will be using the standard YC SAFE notes, no value cap: https://www.ycombinator.com/documents
• As mentioned, discounting is based on the precedent set by Julie's investment in the same pool and some sweeteners I've cheekily attached.
  • 0-$25k (no discount)
  • $25k-50k (5% discount)
    • Coffee Chat with Metta
  • < $50k (10% discount) - *Featured Angel*
    • Gupta Group Tickets (Only 1 ticket)
    • Collision Tickets (Only 1 ticket)

• Salubrum is on the look out for a Full Stack Engineer as our new CTO, recommendations would be welcome!
• Salubrum will announce our Seed round by July 1st 2024, we are accepting Angel investment with discounted SAFEs and encourage Angels to get in touch as soon as possible in order to reserve their spot.
• Salubrum has spent much time ideating and developing our idea in order to stay as lean as possible, this has resulted in a well thought out budget of the very most essential spending items.