Jonathan Samples, cofounder of Carrollton, Ga.-based Across Healthcare, began his career in healthcare nearly 20 years ago, working for a small company that would grow to become Greenway Health, one of the largest ambulatory EHR vendors in the industry today.
Mr. Samples recently left Greenway to start Across Healthcare with cofounder Jason Colquitt, both for a change of pace and to be able to offer the industry a solution he saw many companies need.
"We looked at the industry and saw there was a tremendous amount of innovation," Mr. Samples says. "There are a lot of different companies that need to advance what they're offering, but one of the problems they run into is there aren't enough people to help them who understand all of healthcare's moving parts and how they fit together."
Capitalizing on that niche, the two began Across Healthcare in hopes of offering their expertise to help companies advance at a faster pace, deciding on the name because of their desire to connect companies' needs with solutions and make sure information effectively flows across the compartmentalized parts of the industry.
Mr. Samples spoke with Becker's Hospital Review about what's changed in healthcare since his early days with Greenway and the future of Across Healthcare.
Question: What kind of solutions do you offer customers?
Jonathan Samples: Our typical client is either an EHR company or a company that wants to do business with a health record company, so that might be a clinical research company trying to pull information out of an EHR or communicate information back and forth. Or it may be something as simple as a company that comes to us and says I need an effective way to remind my patients about appointments, whether through text messaging or email or voice reminders. We really engage with those clients and help from a strategy standpoint. One of the services we provide to them is determining which direction they should go in, what technology they should use to get there and what's the best path to get them there. We can come in with those solutions and actually build the product to meet those needs for the client. We have a great team of business analysts, product designers and testers that can really deliver a solution. Our philosophy is take great technology and some really good domain expertise and you'll be able to deliver efficient, higher quality solutions.
We're also offering perspective on best practices, trying to identify the best and most efficient mechanism to share data and communicate with these different systems. So we are providing knowledge in how data is stored and structured and what industry standards are. Then there's a lot of real-world expertise in terms of the real-world application versus how those solutions work in theory.
Q: What have you seen change in how companies operate since your early days with Greenway Health?
JS: One interesting thing is when you're a startup and basically self-funded, you really start asking yourself a lot of questions about exactly what you need to spend money on. We've embraced a lot of open-source software; we've also embraced a lot of cloud infrastructure. Do we need to buy a server or can we just use Microsoft's cloud or Amazon's cloud? As a startup now, I can have a world-class data center at Microsoft or Amazon for less than $100 a month whereas in the past we would've had to built those out and spent millions of dollars in infrastructure investment. Now, a credit card and a couple of clicks I have that same world-class infrastructure replicated on both coasts in just a few minutes.
Q: What are Across' plans for the next year?
JS: We've got contracts on the table to grow about 30 percent to 40 percent in the next year. We don't really see that slowing down as the word gets out and we're networking more we're seeing that grow because the demand is there. I think a lot of people in healthcare now are starting to look past the a lot regulatory changes and say "OK, we're past that. How do we move our products along where they're more usable and connected?" Those companies are looking for people who can help deliver on those solutions.
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