Built To Enjoy: eClinicalWorks CEO Girish Navani (Part 4)

SM: When you first started selling to individual physicians, how much money were they willing to pay? Typically when you bootstrap a company, you need to make money quickly in order to survive.

GN: To be completely honest, that is one area where I completely lucked out. I ended up making a significant amount of money buying and selling options in a big storage company. I ended up having enough of a safety net to know that my wife would not be upset for at least another year. That gave me some time. I could have always parked that money and never worried about it, but I made the decision to use it since it was money that I had made from investments anyways.

We never got nervous with the profitability side of it. I had not left my job yet, and we were working on a very simple premise. I had a pretty significant income stream which could support my lifestyle as well as the business operations. We were not going to go out and burden ourselves where a time bomb would go off earlier than we wanted it to go off. We did not want to have the burden and pressure of getting to market too quickly and have a situation where we would not be ready with a product that would capture imaginations.

SM: How long did it take you to get your first product out?

GN: We had Dr. Raj using it by the end of 1999. A few of his friends were able to use it then as well. We didn’t even have to let the first doctors use it free because we had a pricing model that was a no-brainer. We had set a price point where a doctor would not say no. We sold it for $250 a month. We still charge that same price today.

SM: What functionality does a doctor’s office get for $250?

GN: They are getting a full EMR that will pass any certification and can be deployed in any number of situations that you can imagine. It does everything from scheduling to faxing, scanning, progress notes, drug interactions, lab ordering, prescription writing, and numerous other functions. It is a full, comprehensive EMR.

SM: Can you describe the user interface? Are there people other than doctors entering data?

GN: There are multiple ways to do data entry because we know doctors do not think similarly to each other. Some doctors like the point-and-click interface on a tablet PC. Very early on we started with a focus on tablet PCs, and we are very friendly to those environments. We allow you to dictate using voice recognition software like Dragon. We support the handwriting recognition software that comes with many PCs. You can hand write and have the data entered automatically. Of course, we also support keyboard entry. Physicians can mix and match any of those methods as they choose.

SM: How do you compare with Epic?

GN: I think we are two good companies that focus on different market segments. One focuses on integrated delivery networks and large hospital organizations and the other on outpatient and ambulatory doctors. At one time we used to focus only on small physician practices. That changed by 2005. Now we have large institutions with more than 600 doctors. We do not do any inpatient software. Epic does a lot of inpatient work with some ambulatory offerings.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Built To Enjoy: eClinicalWorks CEO Girish Navani
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