Joel Finlayson joins FirstHx Board of Directors

TORONTO – Dr Chris O’Connor CEO of FirstHx, has announced the appointment of Joel Finlayson (pictured) as a member of the FirstHx Board of Directors.

“Joel is an incredible individual who brings a great depth of knowledge about healthcare systems both public and private. He has extensive international experience and has worked on many large-scale transformative healthcare projects. He has worked with both newer and established technology companies implementing innovative new approaches to care. He will be a tremendous asset to FirstHx.”

“When I learned about FirstHx, I could see the potential for it to help not just patients but the healthcare system as well,” said Finlayson. “FirstHx is directly capturing patient’s symptoms in a knowledge-based structured format that has the potential to greatly improve the patient experience and the process of care. I can see wide applicability anywhere a history is taken both in Canada and internationally.”

First History is a knowledge-based application that patients use on their smartphone to record their unique medical histories before seeing their healthcare provider. Once recorded the history can then be shared with the healthcare team. FirstHx was founded by two physicians, Mark Benaroia and Roman Ellinson, and Ziv Kenet, who lead technology development and operations. They created FirstHx when they saw an opportunity for technology to improve the often difficult and time-consuming process of patients telling their medical stories to the healthcare team. Now with over 7 years of development work and clinical trials FirstHx is being used in both primary care and urgent care settings.

Joel has been consulting to and investing in healthcare for over twenty years in Canada, the US, the UK and throughout the Middle East.

Joel returned to consulting in 2021 joining Accenture Canada as a managing director in healthcare. He spent the previous four years investing in health technology companies with iGan Partners, a Toronto-based healthcare venture fund. In this capacity he sat on iGan’s Investment Committee and served on several portfolio company boards including: MedChart and SOMA Detect. Joel also assumed an interim role running Sales & Partnerships for Think Research, an iGan portfolio company, for the year leading up to its IPO in late 2020.

Joel previously led a large healthcare consulting practice covering the Middle East for PwC and Monitor Group prior to that firm’s acquisition in 2013. He built his consulting career with Monitor in Canada, the US and then the Middle East.

As a consultant, Joel has led large-scale health system reform programs and he is well-versed with the needs and complexities of health system transformations. He is an advocate for private sector collaboration with governments in the modernization healthcare and has experience driving the adoption of new technologies and new data-driven services to help address some of the most pressing and complicated challenges in healthcare.

Joel has an undergraduate degree in Politics & Economics from Dalhousie University in Canada and an MBA from the University of Cambridge in the UK and has completed the Global Health Leadership Program at UC Berkeley School of Public Health and the Innovating Health for Tomorrow (IHT) executive program at INSEAD.

He has been a director of the Canadian Royal College of Physicians & Surgeons International and he is a fellow of the Creative Destruction Lab in Toronto. He lives in Toronto with his wife and three children.