Doctor, Doctor!

With residency complete, I rented space in the basement of St. Vincent Hospital to launch a solo practice in Internal Medicine. I’d been pondering  how to program the Apple II+ to improve practice efficiency and patient satisfaction. Three needs stood out: problem list maintenance, medication/prescription management, and customized info printouts for the patient. During those early months, the appointment book had plenty of gaps, and I spent them writing code in Apple Basic.

I had wide printer paper manufactured with perforations; it would tear apart into a letter-sized page and 3 prescription slips. As each visit ended, I updated the patient’s problem and medication lists, checked off any necessary refills, and selected from a list of information handouts for various conditions. Zing, zing went the Epson dot matrix printer. Then I handed the patient a summary of their diagnoses and medications, educational information, follow-up instructions, and a stack of neatly printed prescriptions.

By the mid-80’s, PC hardware and software had advanced enough to put a networked workstation in every room of the medical office, sharing data from a relational database stored on a centralized hard disk drive. So I set out to write the next generation of my EMR software.

GUIs (graphical user interfaces) weren’t yet in wide use, and many experts argued that doctors would never use keyboards, but I rejected that opinion. I figured that doctors resisted keyboards more because of “secretarial stigma” than from an inability to learn touch-typing; and since any clinician using an EMR regularly would soon become an expert user, an efficient keyboard command interface would serve them well.

In 1993, Rick Samco and David Moffenbeier, two of the early founders of Mentor Graphics, joined me. At Mentor, they had been through all phases of a fast-growing business, but my only experience was managing a handful of staff in my medical office. With physicians being the key customers for our EMR, they insisted I leave my medical practice and be MedicaLogic’s full-time CEO. Thus began my 10 year on-the-job learning experience.

My comfort zone had been as a solo programmer writing software. Now that was over, because we needed a larger team to move quickly, upgrading from a character-based program in MS-DOS to a more modern graphical user interface. By 1994 this team had created Logician, a fully-featured EMR running on Microsoft Windows. Records were securely stored on an Oracle database back-end.

Our sales kept doubling every year, putting us on the Inc 500’s list of the fastest growing companies for 3 years in a row while we acquired marquee customers, even including the NASA astronaut program. But the late 90’s dot-com boom drove the expectations for startup companies even higher. “Get big and go public, or go home” was the challenge, and we accepted it, joining the parade of companies preparing for an IPO in 1999.

While the IPO may be considered the holy grail by many entrepreneurs, for me it just felt like a necessity of the moment we lived in, and it was exhilarating and terrifying in equal measures. Once public, we joined the frantic wave of mergers and acquisitions underway, buying Medscape, which operated both physician- and consumer-facing medical news websites, a digital records transcription firm, and smaller companies with technologies (such as electronic prescribing) that rounded out our offerings.

Within months, the dot-com bubble popped, dragging the NASDAQ market — and all newly public companies — down with it. Customer confidence and sales deflated along with the stock price. We sold off Medscape and slashed expenses while we searched for a corporate buyer that might recognize the value of our product and customer base, if not our stock certificates.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, as I drove to the Portland airport to fly to a meeting with General Electric executives about an acquisition, the news came on the radio. The staff at our Medscape office in New York were shell-shocked but unhurt. Beyond that, time just stopped.