Who are the Up and Coming HIT Companies of 2012?

Humedica now works with provider organizations in 30 states that are responsible for more than 20 million patients, Weintraub says, adding: “We are investing in scaling up to take the company to the next level.”

Practice Fusion
When web-based electronic health record vendor Practice Fusion launched in 2006, the company expected to charge physician offices around $300 per month. “We had the idea of being the Salesforce.com of healthcare,” notes Ryan Howard, the company’s CEO and chairman. But Howard’s team soon switched gears when potential customers balked at paying even that much.

Practice Fusion changed to a free service that is supported by advertising and hasn’t looked back since. “Because we were small we had the agility to change quickly based on physician feedback,” Howard says.

Ryan Howard

In order to be attractive to advertisers, Practice Fusion had to have a strong user base, so it battled a chicken and egg problem the first few years. But with more than $40 million in venture funding and other investments, it has grown to 150,000 users today. “Price point is the most obvious way we are disruptive,” Howard says. One of his greatest challenges, he says, is just managing the San Francisco-based company’s growth. It now has 150 employees and is adding eight to 10 per month.

“My job is to maintain the culture,” Howard says. “We love our users and they love us. Look at our Facebook page and look at Allscripts’ Facebook page, and I think you’ll see quite a contrast.”

Howard notes that the timing of the federal government’s EHR incentive program has helped immensely. “I think we came out at exactly the perfect time because it takes three or four years to build out the product,” he says, “and meaningful use comes along and is basically a $20 billion marketing campaign. It is a massive catalyst for our business.”

Montage Healthcare Solutions
Clinicians often make good entrepreneurs because they can clearly see a product niche that needs filling. That’s the case with Montage Healthcare Solutions, which was founded by a group of radiologists and imaging informatics experts. Their radiology search engine grew out of their own daily work in the Department of Radiology in the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP) in Philadelphia. Montage enables radiologists and researchers to search their own radiology information system and EHRs for specific diagnoses.

“We had a lot of data but had trouble getting access to that data,” explains William Boonn, M.D., Montage’s president. They could ask a database analyst to help them craft something, but that might take a week and then the radiologists would have to go through iterations to refine those searches. “With today’s technology, we expect to find that information instantly just like searching with Google,” Boonn says. “So we saw opportunities for hospitals to search their imaging systems to help with clinical data support, for performance measurement and efficiency and for research at academic medical centers.”

Montage’s founders had previously developed a product called Yottalook, a widely popular and free medical imaging search engine. The commercial product, Montage, combines Yottalook’s external search capabilities with an enhanced capability to query both radiology and pathology information systems.

As Woojin Kim, M.D., another Montage executive and associate director of imaging informatics at HUP, told Healthcare Informatics in a January 2012 interview, a lot of hospitals are building their own data warehouses or buying one so that they can federate their databases and mine them. “This is a nice application that can sit on top of such a system,” he adds, “where its easy-to-use interface allows for powerful searching capability across multiple different databases.”

Woojin Kim, M.D.

Launched in 2009, Montage now has a dozen hospital customers and expects to announce several more soon. Its users include radiologists, administrators, non-radiology physicians, and research coordinators.

One milestone that may boost sales is a reseller agreement with speech recognition reporting vendor Nuance Communications Inc. “They are a large company with a big reach, something like 1,500 customers,” Boonn adds. “We are excited to be integrating with their flagship product. It gives the ability for radiologists doing dictation to access Montage. It’s easier in some way to approach their installed customer base than to approach new customers.”