With its foothold in the long-term care industry established, Halifax senior care startup Tenera Care is looking to diversify into other market segments — a push being led by an announcement Wednesday that Tenera will partner with retirement home company Shannex.

Under the deal, Shannex will pilot Tenera’s technology in an arrangement backed by the CAN Health Network, which acts as a national buying consortium for healthcare providers. If the pilot results are promising, the deal could result in sales to other CAN Health member organizations.

Tenera’s system uses wearable devices to track the movements of seniors in residential care homes. The company expects its technology to eventually replace existing nurse paging systems, which rely on patients pressing buttons or pulling chords to call for help.

“We’re giving the people in retirement living better information as they progress through their health and their life to make better decisions,” said CEO Stewart Hardie in an interview.

CAN Health identifies pain points among its member organizations, which include hospital networks, assisted living facilities and other medical service providers. Then, the industry group searches for a Canadian technology company that could address the pain point, backs a pilot project and makes the results available to its other members, who can then place additional purchase orders. The organization expanded into Atlantic Canada last May.

Also under the CAN Health umbrella, Tenera’s system is now being rolled out by the Bruyere hospital network in Ottawa — another CAN Health member — where it is being tested in an acute care setting to prevent “elopement" — patients wandering off either deliberately or due to confusion.

“For a smaller company like ourselves to get into the Fraser Health Authority in BC, or Alberta Health Services … would be very challenging,” said Hardie.

“But what we can do with this system is we can go into Bruyere, and we prove out our system … And because they're all members of the same group and organization, we can do one national RFP (request for proposals).”

Shannex, founded in 1988, owns assisted living facilities in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Ontario.

Hardie said his team has achieved significant market penetration in care homes, with a few thousand patients now being monitored by Tenera. His plans to expand into other verticals represent an attempt to leverage that success.

Also being tested by Bruyère is Tenera's potential usefulness as a nurse call system.

Tenera, meanwhile, is pursuing changes to the national standards for nurse call systems and related technology via the Standards Council of Canada, which bases its guidelines on those from international group UL, or Underwriter Laboratories.

A panel of patients, regulators and industry insiders will vote this month on whether to amend standards around nurse call and patient monitoring systems. The rule changes could permit healthcare organizations to widely adopt Tenera’s methodology, rather than continuing to rely on antiquated pull cords and call buttons.

Tenera has 22 employees, and after an Omicron-induced lull in operations because healthcare facilities were on lockdown, Hardie said the company is largely back to business as usual.

And with Tenera’s technology fully operational and increasingly battle-tested, Hardie is eyeing a slate of new hires that he hopes will lay the foundational infrastructure for Tenera to emerge as an established corporation.

He plans to hire about 20 people by the end of the year, mostly in non-technical roles like business development and human resources. He expects the compensation packages of the new employees to be at the higher end of market pricing.

“Any smaller company, when they start, everybody wears a number of different hats,” said Hardie. “So now we're starting to take our hats off and get other people in that are specifically suited for that.”