EHR Company Funding Risks – Well Funded EHR Companies

This is the second post in my EHR Company Funding Risks series that was started in response to my original post about the The Current Health IT & EHR Bubble. In this series, we’re looking at the following EHR company categories: Seed Funded, Well Funded, Positive Cash Flow, Large EHR Company, and Large Company Backed EHR. Next up is Well Funded EHR companies.

Well Funded EHR Companies
These EHR companies are those that have moved past the beta phase of their EHR and have usually gotten a large second round of funding that will allow them to work on scaling their EHR user base. This is where I see the largest number of what most would consider “startup” EHR companies. They usually have a few million in the bank and somewhere between 50-200 doctors on their platform.

With the money in the bank, most of these EHR companies have a number of years of runway to be able to see their EHR company play out. They still haven’t made it to what I call the EHR promise land of 1000+ doctors on their platform, but they have enough money to try and reach that goal over the next couple years.

The risk for a practice choosing one of these well funded EHR companies is what will the EHR vendor choose to do once they reach 1000+ doctors. Will they sell the company off to someone else (which almost never ends well for the practice)? Or do these EHR vendors have the staying power and desire to go after something much larger? The other risk is that the EHR company will only ever have a few hundred doctors. When you’re a well financed EHR company that doesn’t gain traction, this will usually end up in a fire sale of the EHR to some other company who wants to acquire the users you do have.

Despite the risks mentioned above, many really love these “startup” EHR companies that have plenty of funding. They’re usually very responsive companies that are able to have a real personal touch with their users. They usually have some unique selling proposition which the practice found so intriguing in the first place.

Most of the Free EHR vendors fit in this or the previous seed funded category as well. However, the amount of funding that the Free EHR vendors require is a multiple higher because they usually need to be able to reach a certain install base before their revenue model kicks in. The other principles are very much the same. Although, most of the free EHR vendor revenue models require a large user base. The Free EHR promise land is probably closer to 10,000 and some might argue that to really make it work they need 100,000+.

Next up, we’ll look at Positive Cash Flow EHR Companies. Read all the posts in the EHR Company Funding Risks series.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

4 Comments

Click here to post a comment
   

Categories