Looks like Medfusion’s Steve Malik is putting the band back together.
Vikram Natrajan, a former tech leader Medfusion from 2003 to 2008, will rejoin the Cary company as its chief technology officer. Malik is now charting a the course for Medfusion, which he reacquired the last three years after he sold it Intuit for $91 million.
“I worked with Vik all the way back in the late 90s,” Malik told WRALTechWire. “We had a fantastic run that was really marked by him having some great outcomes, solving some very difficult problems we had to work through… We’re looking forward to reestablishing the magic we had before.”
Medfusion, which Malik founded in 1996, developed software tools to help doctors communicate with patients. Those tools covered a range of services including online billing, prescription refills, appointments and lab results, all through an online portal.
Malik says that Medfusion was a little early with some of the things that the company was working on. But now, patient and physician understanding of health IT capabilities has caught up. Malik adds that federal requirements of health care reform call for more automation and digitizing of records. He sees that as an opportunity for Medfusion as patients get access to data such as medical charts and lab results.
“Previously. in finance, If you wanted a stock quote, you had to go to stockbrokers office,” Malik said. “Now you can see how quickly financial information moves. We think as people get the data for their health care information we can produce ways to use this.”
Already the health marketplace is being flooded with new apps. But Malik says that Medfusion has something that many of those upstarts lack: relationships with doctors. Medfusion handled 200 million transactions last year. Malik said that that established presence with both patients and health care providers will give Medfusion the edge in developing applications that consumers and doctors want.
“If the doctor is not in the equation, (app developers) fall by the wayside at some point,” Malik said.
Natarajan sees the challenges facing the health industry as similar to those faced by the financial industry years ago. Data is housed in multiple locations and the the systems that work with that data must deal with interoperability hurdles. Natarajan kept a hand in the health IT realm even after leaving Medfusion. He worked in startups, telehealth and telemedicine and the contract research organization Health Decisions. Natarajan said that the experiences mean he brings more to the table his second time around with Medfusion.
“I’m back because I want to be part of a management team that I jelled with really well,” he said. “It’s a great culture fit.”
Intuit incorporated Medfusion into its own health unit in 2010 and renamed the division Intuit health. Malik said that some of the initiatives that he’s pursuing with Medfusion are also goals pursued by Intuit. But he said that Intuit’s decision to sell the division was not because it did not see opportunity in health IT but rather because it chose to refocus on its core business of financial software.
“They knew that I was in the best position to fulfill the potential of the business, that’s why they sold it to me,” he said.
As a smaller company that’s more focused on health IT opportunities, Malik believes Medfusion can develop new software and apps faster as a smaller company rather than as a division of a large one. Medfusion currently employs 80 including 50 workers in Cary. That total is less than the more than 100 who worked for Medfusion when Intuit bought the company but Malik is building back his team with more hires. Medfusion has 12 job openings now and the company is looking to hire workers in quality assurance as well as software engineers and database engineers.
