From Waterloo undergrad to doctor and health-tech leader

Growing up in Cambridge, Ontario, Dr. Doug Kavanagh (BSE ’06) always had a sense of where his future might lead. Long before he arrived at the University of Waterloo as part of the inaugural software engineering cohort, he was already imagining how he might one day follow in the footsteps of his parents, health-tech entrepreneurs who built a company from the ground up.

“I grew up watching both my parents build a company from scratch, which sparked my interest in using technology to improve health care,” says Kavanagh, now the co-founder and medical director of OceanMD. “My dad was a family physician, a programmer and a devoted father. Seeing him balance those roles made a deep impression on me. He showed me that it was possible to care for patients while also creating the tools that support modern health care. He was the one who first taught me how to code in C. I shared his passion right away, eventually writing my first video game in high school. Software engineering at Waterloo was a dream education for me.”

Drs. Doug and James Kavanagh pictured during a tour of Velocity (also pictured are Dr. Fok-Han Leung and Eli Clarke)

After completing his degree at Waterloo, Kavanagh pursued medicine. This path allowed him to bridge two worlds he cared about deeply: technology and patient care.

Before his parents sold their company, PS Suite, to TELUS Health in 2013, Kavanagh and many of his classmates gained early exposure to digital health as co-op students at the family business.

“Working as a co-op student for an electronic medical records (EMR) company showed me how much practical, well-designed technology can help patients and clinicians,” he recalls. “Those experiences drew me into medicine because I wanted to understand the clinical side well enough to build tools that truly support the people delivering care.”

Although health care is often associated with cutting-edge innovation, Kavanagh saw firsthand that many family practices still wrestled with outdated systems and heavy administrative burdens. He believed technology could do far more to make everyday clinical work easier and to help patients connect with care.

Today, Kavanagh is both a practicing physician and co-founder of OceanMD, a cloud-native health technology platform trusted by more than 50,000 health-care professionals across 6,000 clinics and hospitals in Canada.

OceanMD facilitates more than 4 million patient engagements every month and processes 2 million eReferrals annually, helping modernize clinical workflows and improve the way patients move through the health-care system.

The company remains a family venture, with his brother Jeff serving as CEO and co-founder. Victoria Badgley and Greg Taylor (BMath ’92) are also co-founders and leaders at the company.

Throughout his journey, Kavanagh says that Waterloo has remained a defining anchor.

“Waterloo’s engineering and co-op program was a humbling and formative experience,” he says. “Serving real clients while keeping up with my studies pushed me to aim higher and build solutions that worked in the real world. The habits I developed stayed with me through medical training and into entrepreneurship.”

Kavanagh sees both PS Suite and OceanMD as Waterloo success stories. “Waterloo talent has been part of our companies from the start. Many classmates I worked with in co-op later became key contributors at PS Suite and OceanMD. That shared mindset of curiosity and practical problem-solving helped shape our culture.”

In 2021, OceanMD was acquired by WELL Health Technologies, marking another milestone in the family’s longstanding commitment to improving health care through technology.

“I am grateful for the lessons I gained from watching my parents build a health-tech company and for the co-op and academic experiences that shaped my time at Waterloo,” Kavanagh says. “Together, they set me on a path where I can contribute as both a physician and a builder of tools that help improve care.