Eight companies, four decades.

ResApp Health was built around technology developed by Associate Professor Udantha Abeyratne and his team at the University of Queensland’s School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering — research originally funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and licensed to ResApp by UQ’s commercialisation arm UniQuest in September 2014. The core model listens to thirty seconds of a patient’s cough recorded by an ordinary smartphone microphone — and tells you, with clinical-grade accuracy, what’s wrong with their respiratory system. Asthma. Pneumonia. Croup. Bronchiolitis. COPD. No spirometer. No accessory. No hardware beyond a phone they already own.

I joined the board as Non-Executive Director in December 2017, alongside co-founder Brian Leedman and CEO Tony Keating. It was the first company I’d worked with where the core IP was not architecture or workflow but an algorithm — a model trained on tens of thousands of labelled audio samples. The products were ResAppDx (paediatric respiratory diagnosis, regulatory-cleared in Europe with a CE Mark and approved by Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration) and SleepCheckRx (prescription consumer sleep-apnoea screening).

In April 2022, Pfizer announced an intention to acquire ResApp at A$0.115 per share. After strong COVID-19 cough-detection results came out of the diligence period — a pilot study of 741 patients across the US and India, including 446 confirmed positives, returning 92% sensitivity from cough alone — the scheme consideration was revised upward, first to A$0.146, then to a final A$0.208 per share, valuing ResApp at approximately AUD $179 million (US$116 million). The final price was a 131.1% premium to the closing share price the day before the original announcement.

The scheme meeting was held on 7 September 2022. 83% of shareholders voted in favour — safely above the 75% supermajority required. The scheme was implemented on 23 September 2022. ResApp became part of Pfizer Digital. For a twenty-person Brisbane company listening to coughs, it remains one of the most successful digital-health exits in Australian history.

I founded CommtechWireless in 1992 as a partnership called Commtech Paging Systems. The starting capital was twenty-four thousand dollars saved while I was still at Austco. After a photocopier, two PCs and a print run of brochures, the bank balance was down to about five thousand two hundred. I figured that would last twelve months at one hundred dollars a week. The office was a nine-square-metre shed behind a friend’s house in Mosman Park — in the peak of summer it hit forty-five degrees by the middle of the day. My brother Mike charged me fifty dollars a week board; I lived on the other fifty.

The thesis was simple. Hospitals had nurse-call systems, patient-monitoring systems, fire-alarm systems and security systems — and none of them spoke to each other or to the staff who needed the information. Casinos had the same problem with slot-machine alerts, surveillance, and incident response. We built the middleware. After twelve months of hundred-hour weeks we launched BASEPage in 1995 — the world’s first PC-based wireless-messaging platform — and the first sale was to Telecom New Zealand. Inside a year, every public hospital in New Zealand was running it.

The company was incorporated in 1994, renamed CommtechWireless in 1999, and won an AusIndustry R&D Start Grant of $1.6m in 1998 to fund the development of BASEPage2000. Zane Lewis joined in 1996 and would later open the Florida office in 2001. By 2002, Zane and I had established Keteli (Hong Kong), taking a fifty-percent stake in China-based electronics manufacturer K2 Wireless.

By the time of the trade sale, the platform was running in 53 countries across approximately 8,000 customer sites, with offices in Perth, Sydney, Jacksonville, Boca Raton, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Vejle (Denmark), and London. Headline customers: Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Saudi Ministry of Health, Wynn Macau, the US Army / Navy / Air Force, the NSW Rural Fire Service, Erie County Homeland Security (PA), FAO Schwarz New York, TGI Fridays Utah, Bumrungrad Hospital Thailand (the largest in the Southern Hemisphere) — and a duress platform for the President of the United States, used through the Bush administration.

In October 2008 — three weeks into the global financial crisis, with twenty-two investment banks newly underwater — we sold the business to Amcom Software in a deal funded by the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. The cheque didn’t bounce. I stayed on as General Manager for the eighteen months post-acquisition. In 2011, Amcom was rolled into USA Mobility (now Spok) for AUD $163.8m.