Q&A Wednesday :: Cgate Health

Today’s Q&A Wednesday is with Bryan Haardt and Rob Donnelly of Cgate Health. The company recently received a seven figure seed investment from DFJ Mercury, and enjoys offices in both Houston and Austin.

Q: Give us the elevator pitch for your company?
Cgate Health creates software to provide simple, flexible and cost effective Electronic Health Record (EHR) solutions. Unlike the current landscape of complex, incomplete and expensive Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems, our proven software delivers integrated access and a consolidated view of the complete patient record – a gateway to the health record. Healthcare providers and commercial vendors use our platform to achieve their goals of productivity, quality and compliance with Federal mandates.

Q: How did the company get started? Who had the idea? Was there an “A Ha!” moment?
Rob Donnelly and I have known each other in a professional capacity for over a decade and have been friends nearly as long. Rob and I both serve as Venture Advisors for DFJ Mercury. We worked together previously in a product company that partnered with the MD Anderson Cancer Center in an effort to visually integrate the disparate data across the institution in an effort to provide clinicians access to the complete patient record. We were doing some pretty cutting edge stuff in terms of leveraging the HL7 standard and the Microsoft SOA architecture before they even had the nomenclature figured out. We always felt strongly that the solution was a perfect model for building an “integration bridge” for both institution to institution needs as well as  between clinician practice groups and institutions. That was in the 2003-04 timeframe, the appetite for such a solution simply wasn’t there…it was too soon. Flash forward to today and you have a very different landscape. When you combine the current administration’s focus on healthcare and the push for an EMR mandate and the HITECH / ARRA stimulus dollars you end up with an extremely motivated customer base. I had my first wind of what was coming when I started to receive a number of unsolicited information requests concerning what we had done previously at MD Anderson from various large system integration firms. Evidently they had stumbled across several of our case studies and where very interested in our approach. I mentioned this to Rob one day while we were catching up and we just started talking about this convergence of circumstances and how we could leverage our knowledge base and apply it to this growing opportunity.

Q: What was your first indication that you really had something interesting?
What has been really surprising is that no one really has a solution or even a direction. We have been presently surprised by the types of conversations and the access we have received, especially for such a young company.

Q: How has customer adoption been so far?
Early interest has been very favorable and in the interest of not completely giving away everything I will just leave it at that

Q: How do you manage offices in both cities?
We have a Houston office and have a number of development resources in that office but Austin is our HQ. As far as collaborating between two, cities it comes down to constant iterative communication on the vision and direction. We leverage a vast array of collaboration tools such as Microsoft Share Point and CRM Dynamics but the bottom-line is we constantly communicate and hold each other accountable for individual work product…that and a ton of SWA rapid rewards.

Posted by Bryan Menell http://austinstartup.com Bryan is the founder and Editorial Director of AustinStartup.com, which launched in 2005 by Bryan Menell. He is currently the Collaboratory Director at Dachis Group. Bryan advises a handful of early stage companies and is a Managing Director of Capital Factory. To read more posts click here.