Built To Enjoy: eClinicalWorks CEO Girish Navani (Part 3)

SM: At the point when you were founding eClinicalWorks what was your intent and vision?

GN: It was not very difficult for me to visualize the goal. What I was hoping to do was digitize healthcare just like finance and telecom had become digitized. We did not set out to build an EMR or a billing system. We just wanted to get rid of paper from a doctor’s office and make every single connection for the doctor; to the pharmacy, to the lab, and to the doctors supply chain. It just fit my background and I believe in supply chain. The intent was to digitize the communication and workflow between a physician’s office and the rest of healthcare so that doctors could efficiently communicate with the world outside.

SM: What was your market strategy and what reality did you encounter?

GN: The market reality that I encountered at that time was one which had plenty of naysayers. They would say that doctors would not want new technology in their offices. We also heard that we should not waste time going after small doctors because we would not make money. The consensus was that small doctors would not spend money on technology and even if they were willing to spend money it would not be enough to make a profit on it.

SM: What about the physicians themselves?

GN: We took a simple ground up approach to solving the problem. I would visit a doctor and be at their homes and offices, whenever they wanted, to convince them that it would change their lives. It was not obvious to them that this was technology that they needed. They knew they needed a billing system. They did not have any expectations of introducing technology on the clinical side. You had to explain why they even needed to consider that type of solution.

We did not get demoralized because we never really thought we would build a very large company out of this. The goal was to build a small, sustainable company that would survive for the long term. We did not mentally put a price tag on how big it would get. We were perfectly comfortable convincing one doctor at a time that we could help.

We never actually went with a broad sales approach. That is one of the reasons we never went with venture capital, thank goodness. We did not want to borrow capital to spend on sales because we would have burnt all of the cash only to find that when we really needed it that we had nothing left.

SM: When you did visit doctor’s one on one were you able to resonate with them?

GN: That is the secret why we are so successful even today. When physicians actually looked at what we had developed they found that it resembled the way they practice medicine. We built it with my friend, Dr. Raj, at the center of the puzzle. As a result the software turned out to be what a physician really aspired for. They realized that it was not much different than what they were doing on paper and that if they could do it electronically then it could work for them. The challenge was for them to decide if they wanted to spend money on it and how much money they would want to spend up front.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Built To Enjoy: eClinicalWorks CEO Girish Navani
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