Great pediatricians aren’t necessarily great at running a business. They trained in medicine, not inventory systems or insurance reimbursement optimization. Their expertise is in treating kids when they are sick or injured, and using preventive care to keep them healthy.
I learned this firsthand watching my mother, a talented pediatric gynecologist, struggle to handle the business side of her practice. The financial management, the technology, the negotiation, the insurance setup: these were not the things she wanted to spend her energy figuring out — and rightfully so. But these things became vital to the practice’s survival during the pandemic: Patient volume was down, new technology was essential, and it was suddenly difficult to run the practice the same way she’d been doing it for so many years. I jumped in to help. I was good with numbers, I’d been building software and operations for most of my career, and I had a knack for solving problems in a crisis. She took care of patients, and I figured out the rest.
This simple division of labor was an important lesson about the unique burden of independent pediatricians. They undergo intensive preparation — sometimes for well over a decade — to provide exceptional medical care for children. Yet they end up mired in unfamiliar roles in finance, admin and operations that, frankly, are a waste of their valuable expertise.
My uncle is also a pediatrician. From him I learned that a huge portion of these non-medical duties stem from the very vaccines that are so critical to pediatric care. Many people who aren’t pediatricians (and don’t come from a family full of them) are surprised to learn that vaccines put our kids’ doctors at great financial risk for the sake of razor-thin or negative margins.
The insights I gained over my family’s kitchen table are the reason Canid exists. They inspired our core mission: to entirely eliminate the financial risk and administrative burden of pediatric vaccine management. They showed me that we need a new way of managing pediatric vaccines — not by creating a new tool or point solution, but by fundamentally changing the ecosystem.
The Vaccine Dilemma
Pediatric vaccinations are the single most life-saving public health initiative in modern times, second only to access to clean water. Yet the average pediatric practice spends 20 to 30% of its revenue on vaccines. This cash flow and inventory risk can make starting and managing a pediatric practice — a formidable challenge to begin with — a brutal undertaking.
Vaccines represent the second largest expense for most pediatric practices after staff salaries. A jaw-dropping 69% of pediatricians report breaking even or losing money on their vaccine programs. It’s gotten so dire that 36% of pediatricians have stopped or are seriously considering stopping their vaccine programs.
What may look like a simple shot in the arm is actually just one step in a complex, highly manual and time-intensive workflow. For each vaccine administered, pediatricians must navigate a labyrinth of ordering, inventory management, temperature monitoring, insurance verification, coding, billing, reimbursement tracking, dispute resolution and state reporting requirements.
With this workload it’s no wonder that pediatricians are spending an average of 15 hours per week on administrative work, up from 9 hours weekly in 2012, according to Medscape’s annual physician compensation report.
How We Help
When a pediatrician scans a vaccine barcode, they delegate all related administrative work, financial risk and public health compliance requirements to us. This means Canid:
- purchases vaccines, ensuring doctors have all the doses they need on hand at all times
- reports all vaccines administered in accordance with current (and ever-changing) regulations
- verifies patient insurance
- submits bills and disputes rejections
- helps improve reimbursement rates and quality measures
- shares vaccine records with patients when they need them
- provides resources to educate patients on the latest vaccine research
That’s how a multistep administrative nightmare becomes a 14-second scan-and-go workflow. It’s really that easy.
The Journey Ahead
Since Canid launched in 2021, we’ve significantly expanded our reach. We now partner with more than 150 pediatricians across the nation and facilitate about 10,000 vaccinations monthly. One of the next frontiers for us is to tackle another growing pain point for pediatricians: vaccine hesitancy.
We saw an average 12% decline in vaccination doses administered in our network from Q1 2024 to Q1 2025, when comparing the same practices year over year. This mirrors alarming national trends and threatens not just individual health, but the herd immunity that protects entire communities. Our $10 million in Series A funding, led by Telescope Partners, will accelerate the development of technology that allows pediatricians to identify under-vaccinated children and proactively reach patients who have fallen behind on vaccination schedules.
As every pediatrician I’ve ever known will tell you, there’s no shortage of problems that need solving for independent pediatricians. The challenges in this space keep growing and evolving, and so is Canid. We are proud of the progress we’ve made, grateful for our investors and humbled to work with so many dedicated pediatricians across the country. They inspire us every day as we work towards a world where our children’s doctors can simply do what they do best: practice medicine.
If you’d like to know more about how we’re improving life for pediatricians, one practice and one physician at a time, get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.
By Pedro Sanchez de Lozada, Founder & CEO
