Business student Zack Fisch’s experience as a patient who almost lost a leg in an ultimate Frisbee mishap planted the seed for a new health-care app to improve communication between health-care providers and patients.

In his groggy, medicated state, Fisch had not properly absorbed the hospital’s aftercare instructions for his broken leg, and so his too-tight cast led to compartment syndrome, dangerously decreasing blood flow.

Three years later, in partnership with the U of Toronto’s master’s student Cory Blumenfeld, Fisch founded start-up Dash MD with the help of UTEST accelerator, one of U of T’s nine entrepreneurship hubs.

The start-up’s mobile personal health manager can be downloaded without cost by patients, and populated with information provided by health-care providers. Fisch says, in his case, the app could have provided text, video or audio information about fracture care, scheduling pain medications and physiotherapy exercises.

So far, Dash MD has partnerships with 30 Canadian hospitals, and the app is now live in nine hospitals in Ontario.