Quebec is open. All of it.
Anyone in the province can now walk into a Dynacare collection site, or have a phlebotomist come to their home, and the entire experience happens in French. That has been live since this week.
If you are a member outside Quebec, you might reasonably wonder why this took us as long as it did. Canada is one country and we already served the rest of it. The honest answer is that Quebec is its own market in ways that are easy to underestimate until you try.
Nine million people, and most of them live and speak in French
About 22% of Canadians live in Quebec. That is roughly 9 million people. If you dropped Quebec into the United States it would be the 12th most populous state, ahead of Virginia and Washington.
Around three quarters of them speak predominantly French at home. That is not a language preference the way it might be somewhere else. It is the language they think in, the language they describe symptoms in, and the language they want to read a health result in at nine at night when something looks off.
Quebec also runs on civil law rather than common law. Along with Louisiana in the US, it is the only jurisdiction in North America that does. If you are building anything that touches contracts, consent or personal health information, the ground under you is different.
And a health system that surprises people
Here is the fact that surprised us most. Quebec has more physicians practising entirely outside the public health system than every other Canadian province combined. Over 600 of them, against roughly a dozen across the rest of the country.
Quebec also holds about 36% of Canada's privately operated diagnostic imaging clinics while having 22% of the population.
None of that means Quebecers spend more on private health care. They actually spend slightly less than the national average. What it means is that the province has built more room for care that sits alongside the public system rather than inside it, and Quebecers are used to that idea in a way the rest of the country is not.
What we actually built
Translating a website is a weekend. Building a health platform that works in French is not.
Our checkout, our emails, the app, your results and your conversations with your coach are all in French. So is the part nobody sees, which is how we read the lab report itself. French labs write decimals with a comma rather than a period, so a result that reads 5,4 mmol/L in Montreal reads 5.4 in Vancouver. Our system had to learn the difference, and getting that wrong on a glucose value is not a formatting bug.
We also had to get the clinical side right. Every panel is ordered by a nurse practitioner licensed in Quebec, and every result is reviewed before it reaches you. That is the same standard we hold everywhere, and Quebec was the province that made us prove it properly.
Why we took the months
In our July update we wrote about checking all 153 of our biomarker reference ranges one at a time, reading each one directly out of the running system rather than out of the documents describing it, because documentation is where errors hide.
Quebec is the same instinct applied to a whole province. We could have opened faster with a translated marketing site and hoped nobody noticed. We would rather have spent the months.
Last week an employer group of 1,200 people signed with us and told us the French experience is why they chose us. It turns out doing the harder thing is also the thing that sells.
If you are in Quebec
You can book a walk-in at a Dynacare collection site anywhere in the province, or keep booking at-home draws as before. Set your language to French in your profile and everything follows, including your results and your coaching.
If you are somewhere else and you have family or colleagues in Quebec, they can join now too.
Rex Farrand
Founder and CEO, MyHealthspan
Author
As Co-Founder and CEO of Healthspan, a health tech startup focused on the longevity health space, I'm on a mission to extend healthspan and lifespan by decades, not years.
