🔥Upside Chat: Harrison Brown, CEO of HEADCHECK Health, a digital health company providing a concussion management platform to sports organizations.

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🔥Upside Chat: Harrison Brown, CEO of HEADCHECK Health, a digital health company providing a concussion management platform to sports organizations.

Julien Blin

Sep 27, 2022

This week we had the honor to interview interview Harrison Brown, CEO of HEADCHECK Health, a digital health company providing a concussion management platform to sports organizations.

HEADCHECK Health’s digital app platform simplifies the process of executing and monitoring adherence to your concussion protocol. HEADCHECK has been built by feedback from medical professionals over the past nine years of partnerships throughout all levels of sport. Currently more than 3000 sports organizations use HEADCHECK to advance player safety including Major League Soccer, the Canadian Football League, Trek-Segafredo, True Lacrosse, and USA Cycling.

Here is a picture of the HEADCHECK Health’s digital app and platform:

Here is a video interview of Harrison Brown talking about HEADCHECK Health:

Video: HEADCHECK Health

📝Show Notes: Through this interview, we touched on his background, his company, product, the benefits for the teams, and his business model. Then we discussed his plans for the next 12 months.

Best Quotes: Here’s some of the key discussion points and best quotes from our conversation with Harrison:

On his background:
- “ I was an academic researcher. I was doing some concussion research studies as part of my master's in PhD studies at the university of British Columbia. That was really where HEADCHECK Health started. Before that I did have an affinity to sports as I played all different sports growing up. Rugby was probably my main sport”.
On how he got to the idea of starting HEADCHECK Health:
- “So the idea behind HEADCHECK Health in the beginning was: How about we carve off a really small but important piece of the concussion problem? And we try to solve it. So the idea behind it was: Can we make a platform that makes it easier for organizations to actually execute and monitor those concussion protocols?”.
On how the HEADCHECK Health platform works:
- “HEADCHECK Health is an all in one software platform to execute those protocols. What that means is that it covers a hundred percent of the protocol. 10, 15 years ago, protocols were just tests. It was about running only one test”.
- “These protocols are very broad and there's much more than just testing. There's education. There's training, there's documentation. And sometimes five or six different individuals, all with different medical backgrounds contributing to a protocol”.
- “So the idea behind HEADCHECK Health all along was let's make it really easy for organizations to complete their policies and protocols. And then the other side to it is the analytics. If we have 100% of the protocol on our platform and we have 100% of the data being collected, we can do analytics to help the organizations”.
On the types of customers using their software today:
- “When we first started the company, we were really focused on an app and the platform to execute the protocols. And so our customers at the time were people that were executing those protocols. Those are folks that are on the sideline, like athletic trainers, athletic therapists, or team physicians”.
- “But now we're actually working with entire sports organizations like governing bodies or even at the country level”.
- “We've had about 40,000 concussions that have been managed through our platform, from the incidents all the way through return to play and recovery”.
On the importance of collecting customer feedback to build new features:
- “I'd say that right now probably about 80% of the functionalities on the platform came from customer feedbacks. So it's a product that we say is built by people executing these protocols for people that are executing these protocols”.
On their business model:
- “Before we came into this market, tests were running the market. That means that you would charge per test anytime somebody used your product, so you would charge them a certain amount of dollars”.
- “The model that we use is essentially an unlimited model. It's a software as a service company. We charge our clients and our partners an annual fee. That annual fee is a product of the complexity of their protocol, the number of teams that are in the organization, and the number of players that are being managed”.
- “And usually where we end up with is a number that ends up being cheaper than if they were just to buy a single test. So if they were to buy a test and that was their protocol, buying a test and using the test, they actually can buy HEADCHECK Health for a cheaper cost. There's no additional fees. It's the same fee every year, depending on the number of players or teams, if they go up and down, so does the contract. That allows the organizations to budget properly. And they're not worrying about: “Hey, is the concussion cost going to be significantly higher this year than it was last year?”.
On their plans for the next 12 months:
- “We raised money most recently in May 2022 so the company is well resourced. We're investing a lot of that money into R&D. We really want to make sure that we maintain the product advantage that I believe we have over anybody else. Yeah. So on the product side, we've got some pretty exciting things that we're gonna be rolling out over the next 12 months”.
- “But of course we know that down the road, there may be another transaction that needs to occur. So we're also always talking and listening to investors to see if there is a fit with our growth strategy and whether it's a fund or a strategic partner or something like that”.
- “And then on the growth side, we're really doubling down at this point on trying to capture markets. So we believe at this point that we have the best tool in the industry. And we believe that we have enough big logos to prove that we work with relevant organizations like the Major League Soccer, USA cycling, the CFL. these large organizations carry brand value that we don't necessarily need to chase after logos”.
- “I think what we want to focus on now is how can we have the biggest impact, and a lot of that is going to have to happen in the youth market”.