For eClinicalWorks, There's More Room For Healthy Growth
Girish Navani, CEO of Westborough-based eClinicalWorks, is a software guy by training. In the mid-to-late 2000s, as the electronic health records company grew, Navani said, he took more of a role on the sales side. But now he’s back working mostly on product development and not devoting too much time to hands-on sales work.
“I don’t need to,” he said. “The customer base is helping us with other customers.”
Navani said that kind of word-of-mouth publicity is part of what keeps the company growing, and it also allows it to devote less than 2 percent of its staff to sales so it can concentrate on its products.
The company’s growth has been enormous and earned it the top spot on our list of top-growing private companies for 2011. In 2003, eClinicalWorks took in $1 million in revenue; it forecasts $200 million for this year, Navani said. In the past year, it added nearly 350 jobs, 215 of them in Massachusetts, hitting a total corporate headcount of about 1700.
Navari said the company’s software has been selling in a variety of settings—private practices, health centers, correctional centers and student health centers. Earlier this month, eClinicalWorks announced that Florida State University and Women’s Care Florida, a practice with 165 providers in 52 locations, were adopting the company’s technology.
Adopting Electronic Records
Electronic health records (EHRs), which let hospitals, primary care doctors and specialists share data about patients, are one of the keys to an emerging health care model that encourages providers to band together to provide the best possible care at the best possible price. The 2009 federal stimulus bill included $27 billion to help hospitals and other providers adopt EHRs.
But Navani said the growth of electronic records is about much more than a government push. He said eClinicalWorks grew to $100 million in revenues even before the stimulus funding passed.
“For businesses to succeed you need to have core value,” he said, and eClinicalWorks is valuable for doctors both in terms of cost savings and, more importantly, quality of care. “It’s about changing health care; it’s about improving health care.”
Room For More Growth
Navani said the adoption of EHRs echoes the move from paper to silicon in other settings, including the financial industry. He said the potential EHR market is in the tens of billions of dollars, and only 30 to 35 percent of the market has adopted electronic records so far. Even after the market is saturated, he said, there will be more waves of new applications to use the data better.
“We’re looking at a pretty big, huge market,” he said. “I expect this market to be a very, very big, fast-growing market for another 10 years.”
Lots Of Competition
Of course, any fast-growing market has lots of companies competing for market share. Navani said lists of EHR vendors show about 300 companies. But he said seven or eight of the names account for 70 to 80 percent of the market.
Navani said he doesn’t see an end to growth for eClinicalWorks any time soon. He said the company plans to hire another 200 people in the near future, probably at least half of them in Massachusetts.
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