BLAKE ADAM

Co-founder MEDIMAP SYSTEMS INC. AGE: 27

LIFE STORY: Although Blake Adam graduated from Uvic's Peter B. Gustavson School of Business in 2011 with a B.comm. specializing in entrepreneurship, he expected to work his way up the corporate ladder. In 2015, frustrated by having to call walk-in clinics to find out which ones were still taking patients, he and software engineer Jonathan Clark decided to create a website showing clinic wait times, but as a convenience rather than a business. In May 2016, Adam, who was born in California and spent his early years there, quit his job in the commercial lending department of Canadian Western Bank to focus full-time on Medimap Systems. By the end of last year, 220 clinics in B.C., Alberta and Ontario were posting wait times to the Medimap website. This year the company launched a service allowing patients to add themselves to a clinic's wait list remotely for $5.

THE BOTTOM LINE: From June through December 2016, the Medimap website attracted 154,000 unique visitors and 333,000 total visits. A monitor at the entrance to White Rock's Peace Arch Hospital's emergency department showing wait times for local medical clinics is a pilot project to test whether Medimap will cause fewer non-urgent patients to use ER. —F.S.