Client Profile: Varsha Chaugai, Co-Founder and CEO of Evoke Health

We’re all getting older. There’s no getting around that. But while many dream of aging gracefully in their own homes, many of us will eventually need some form of long-term care. In the U.S., 2.3% of the nearly 55.8 million Americans aged 65 or older live in a nursing home. That number is expected to grow to almost 95 million by 2060 as the country’s population ages. In Canada, one report predicts that 1.8 million Canadians will need long-term care by 2031.

As more people place their parents in long-term care, there is a growing demand for constant updates on everything from resident status to medication and procedure changes. Delivering these updates means nurses have to spend their time sending emails and logging updates rather than focusing on resident care.

Varsah Chaugai, Co-Founder and CEO of Evoke Health, saw the need for a solution during the COVID-19 pandemic when many families were virtually cut off from their loved ones. With her husband and co-founder Graham Fraser, Chaugai launched Evoke Health to provide a clinical portal that connects nurses and families with resident status, care routines, and appointments. This portal helps deliver better experiences and gives nurses back their time to care for their residents.

Making the entrepreneurial leap

Originally from Nepal, Chaugai came to Canada in 2010 to pursue her biomedical engineering master's degree at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. After graduating, she worked as a medical device engineer, but she knew entrepreneurship was the path that would bring her the most joy.

“I was working for a company that made artificial heart valves, which was amazing. But it didn’t bring me the joy I expected because it wasn’t my own thing. We wanted to try building something of our own,” she says.

Working in engineering and software development, Chaugai and Fraser were constantly frustrated by the difficulty of obtaining their data as healthcare consumers. She says she didn’t even have information on her blood type, even though she had given birth to their two children.

These gaps inspired the couple to dream bigger. They realized that health care infrastructure was like a house built on a weak foundation.

“How do you innovate with machine learning or AI when the foundation is antiquated? As engineers, we thought Let’s get the basics right".

Chaugai and Fraser decided to take the leap, quit their jobs, and move back to Ottawa from Vancouver to be closer to family.

“I was pregnant at the time and my parents said, ‘Oh, having babies is easy. They just sleep.’ So, I thought, you know what, I can start my own company and be a mother at the same time,” Chaugai laughs.

Connecting families through challenging times

After moving back to Ottawa, Chaugai and Fraser started researching healthcare. When they began investigating healthcare challenges, they saw a critical gap in solutions for long-term care patients and their families.

“I had never heard of long-term care. I come from a culture where long-term care is not a thing. Then my mother-in-law, who had her mom in a long-term care home, suggested we look into the gaps there. When we did, I realized that long-term care is an area that no one was paying attention to,” she says.

Chaugai connected with the administrator of a long-term care facility to get a better idea of the day-to-day challenges for nurses and staff. Her research started in January 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic. As Chaugai spoke with staff and resident families, she quickly saw one critical missing component in resident care. The administrator shared that nurses spend much of their time on phone calls with families. Unlike primary care providers, there was no patient portal where families could quickly get updates.

“We started looking into it, and we realized there was no patient portal in long-term care. So I told my husband, ‘Let's build this.’ We'll get into the door and we'll come up with a really big idea. Now, we are engineers. We had no sales experience, so we thought it was the technology that sells, not the sales that sells the technology,” she says.

The problem became even more apparent during the pandemic.

“Families were appearing on the news with stories about not getting updates on their loved ones. In some cases, their parent passed away and they were not notified for days. Our platform could have solved this. We were thinking of saving nurses time on phone calls, and now we saw that families also wanted that access, too,” Chaugai says.

She contacted some families she had heard about on the news and others at local long-term care facilities. Many shared their experiences, which Chaugai says was kind of them during that crisis. Chaugai and Fraser set to work on building the first version of the Evoke Health platform and closed their first US sale in 2021.

Scaling Evoke Health with help from the Accelerator Centre

Chaugai says learning about the Accelerator Centre came at a “very serendipitous” time in her life. She had recently given birth to their second child and was nervous about the impact on her ability to help grow the startup.

“I was in a meetup, and somebody shared the application for the AC:Studio program. It looked like a great opportunity, so we decided to apply. Getting selected was the second-best thing that happened to us in 2022—after my baby—because it gave me the ability to take more risks. I knew I was getting guidance and funding to expand. It really increased my ability to take more business risk,” she says.

As an engineer-led startup, Chaugai says she knew they needed help with sales, marketing, and design.

“It's been such an awesome experience. All of the platform design was originally done by me, and I’m not a designer. Through the AC:Studio program, we’ve had access to the Conestoga Gig Marketplace. I would not have been able to change the UX and do beautiful things with the platform and the website,” she says.

Design wasn’t the only area in which Chaugai received help.

“We landed our first Canadian customer through a pitch at a long-term care conference. It happened because of the Accelerator Centre’s mentorship. They helped me with the pitch, and that's how we got our first client. We also were able to hire our first full-time employee thanks to the funding. AC:Studio gave us that freedom to take the risk because there was funding and expertise coming from all directions,” Chaugai says.

As Evoke Health looks towards 2025, Chaugai says she will continue to build upon the skills and lessons from the AC:Studio program.

“We entered the program with five customers. We now have 69, and hopefully we’ll be at 100 when we graduate in April,” she says.