Built To Enjoy: eClinicalWorks CEO Girish Navani (Part 5)

SM: In 1999 when you went to market, how were you actually selling? Were you knocking on office doors?

GN: The sales model is the same as it is today. When we sold to one customer, they would refer us to four or five other people they knew would be interested. That has made us an inbound sales company from the very early days. We have 34,000 physicians, and the majority of them are happy. They tell their peers [about us].

SM: In 1999 you did not have 34,000 paying physician customers. What were you doing then?

GN: In the first three years we had 500 doctors. We found them by going to small regional shows and conferences. From there, word of mouth carried it. It was peer-to-peer sales versus a software company pushing its product. Because of that, growth has been steady. We never lost patience because we had recurring revenues. Our EMR was $250 a month and our practice management is $150 a month, which makes $400 a month for everything. At that price we were adding enough doctors that we could sustain our company.

In 2003 we won some national recognition. That is when the box really opened up. Then came Facebook and social outlets. A physician decided to open up a group of eClinicalWorks users without asking us for permission. It was open and unregulated. He started inviting all of the other doctors he knew through his professional associations. That group mushroomed into a ‘doctors finding doctors’ phenomena. That portal is still running today, and it has all the good and bad about us. That portal makes it very easy for physicians to decide why and EMR is good for their practice and what it will do for them.

SM: Do you still own 100% of the company, or have you taken institutional investments?

GN: It is owned by the three founders.

SM: Do you host the solution yourself, or do you have a different delivery model?

GN: We host it, but the customer has the choice. We have 10 data centers in the country, and we are the largest SaaS EMR in the country. Nobody has the customer volume that we have in the SaaS model. We like that model because of the recurring revenues. That makes the company profitable. On the flip side, we understand customer needs. Many of our customers do not have reliable broadband.

SM: From a SaaS operations perspective, how did you manage that ramp?

GN: First, we have never built a CD in our life. If you do a standalone installation, you still download the application from the Internet. When I was with Fidelity, I built systems that were used by 500,000 people, and those were considered small systems. Building a scalable architecture was not difficult for any [member] of the founding team. We knew software and were able to develop a scalable solution, and we utilized the full capabilities of the Internet to distribute that solution.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Built To Enjoy: eClinicalWorks CEO Girish Navani
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