2016 Dynamic Dozen No. 12: HealthcareFirst Inc.

SBJ: What has the company’s growth enabled you to do?
Robertson: Over the years, we’ve built many products for our customers, and we look quite different from most of our competitors. If you look at our company, we have three distinct offerings: electronic medical records for home, health and hospice; revenue-cycle management – we actually do outsourced billing, outsourced medical coding and chart reviews; and the third component is analytics. In our market, we have competitors that do just software, competitors that do just revenue-cycle management and competitors that do some analytics, but you don’t have anybody that’s doing all of that. And 90 percent of our customers are licensing products that in some way do all three. So, we’ve brought all of that together into a single solution suite.

SBJ: What are your top issues when it comes to managing growth?
Robertson: Operational excellence at scale is a challenge. We’ve struggled with it in years past where you create such a level of growth that cracks can begin appearing in the dam. We invested in our operations a couple of years ago and invested in a very strong operator, our current (chief operating officer Tom Brock). We recruited him from Atlanta. He’d been with GE [Healthcare] and McKesson, most recently.

SBJ: Where is the tipping point?
Robertson: Our industry is very fragmented as far as solutions providers, so no one company dominates the market. We’ve been climbing this post-acute care market for years, and I’ve not seen the peak of it to this point.

Most of our customers are providers that serve the nation’s elderly. There are over 10,000 patients a day turning 65 in the U.S., so it is very much a growing business, and we are becoming a prominent player in that space.

SBJ: How has your culture changed over the past three years?
Robertson: Our culture has not changed. It has been challenged. About eight years ago, we realized we had very substantial growth ahead of us, and I set our executive team down and we talked through what had got us to that point. Our culture was what surfaced. We made a pact, wrote down what our culture was and agreed that we were going to keep and protect that as we grew. And we’ve done that. When we did that, we probably had 20-something employees. We now have 230-something employees. And every new employee gets a copy of that corporate-culture document. At every review period, we talk through it.

SBJ: Where do you see the company headed in the next five years?
Robertson: We’ve positioned the company with our solution suite for significant growth and adoption. One in five [health care] companies are using some kind of product of ours. We’ve got incredible growth opportunities just by expanding our product mix with customers we already have. I believe we will sustain 20 percent annual growth over the next five years.