One-on-One With Greenway Medical Technologies President Tee Green, Part II

There are also some people that don’t fit our model. Some people aren’t cut out to work in one business for the next 15 or 20 years. You know, they like to spend three years here, three years there. That’s not the person we look for.

GUERRA: How do you feel about competing against a center that’s gotten $8 million from the government?

GREEN: Some of those will be interesting challenges or hurdles. It will be interesting in communities where taxpayer dollars are going to compete against you, but hey, that happens in other business as well.

GUERRA: Essentially, your tax money is going to fund your competition.

GREEN: Right. Just imagine being Ford. [Laughing] I just think that’s bizarre.

GUERRA: A lot of bizarre things are happening these days.

GREEN: Yes, correct.

GUERRA: How do you engage hospital CIOs and make them aware of your product and make them understand that you should be on their Stark shortlist?

GREEN: First of all, it starts with our customers. Our customers are the number one lead generator for this organization, and our customers are the ones that bring us into the hospital systems in their communities.

I would imagine the worst thing you can do as a CIO is to recommend an EHR platform to your community physicians and see them struggle mightily during deployment because then it effects the whole relationship between the hospital and the physicians. And so one of the things that we bring to the table is a track record that our customers are more successful, typically, than our competitors because of our technology platform and our implementation processes. That way, you as a CIO can be assured that not only can you offer state-of-the-art technology, but you can offer a platform that your physicians are going to be successful using. And that means they’re more likely to electronify faster than the competition.

We think there’s a difference between electronifying information and liquefying information. There’s a lot of electronification taking place today in the country. There’s not much liquefying of information, and that means you’re going to have to be able to exchange information very efficiently and very securely in any format, in any security protocol.

So point-to-point interfaces don’t work, and that’s how we built our exchange portal. It allows us to take information from our customers, route it to any hospital, any lab, registry, clinical trial and do that automatically, managed by Greenway, rather than having to write point-to-point interfaces that create havoc in the industry.

GUERRA: Speaking of liquefication, what are your thoughts on CCHIT, the Drummond Group, and certification in general?

GREEN: It is a challenging environment for any of the vendors. The way I look at it, I have to have twice the amount of R&D budget that I normally would have, and I’m going to need X dollars to develop what Washington wants and X dollars available to develop what my customers need. So it’s whatever you would normally spend on R&D times two.

I’m going to make sure that I clear the hurdles of CCHIT and anything that comes from HHS, whether it’s interoperability or meaningful use. Those are the things that are requirements. Those aren’t optional things for us. So I have to be prepared for that, but I’ve also got a huge customer base that has needs in their business exchange, and they’re expecting innovation. So you’ve got to look at your project plans. I mean, half of it goes to Washington and half of it goes to customers. So you really got to have some resources to do that.