American Well’s online care software, Buckley-Fortin says.)
He and Lum made early inroads in their field with Care Hawaii, which provides behavioral health services across Hawaiian Islands. Because the organization was so geographically spread out, Buckley-Fortin says, his firm developed an Internet-based system for its health workers to manage their documentation and billing.
The company now has its own Web-based electronic health record and other applications that are tailored for this niche market. After adding some clients in Massachusetts, starting with Northampton, MA-based mental health and human services provider ServiceNet, eHana established an “awesome” working-living office near ServiceNet where staff from Hawaii could stay while working for the client. Though the 10-person company no longer has that nifty office near the Berkshires, the CEO says, it is now happily headquartered in Boston’s Back Bay.
While the firm is focused on a niche market, there are still competitors that provide software for behavioral health customers such as Netsmart Technologies on Long Island and Lisle, IL-based Sequest Technologies. However, Buckley-Fortin says that his firm stands apart from its competitors with both certain aspects of its technology and its approach to service. For example, the company’s software is all Web-based and delivered as a service. Its technology also doesn’t require customers to make the same upfront investments in hardware they would need to run traditional client/server software.
There are certainly challenges to serving the behavioral health and human services market. John Moore, a health IT analyst and blogger at Chilmark Research in Cambridge, MA, says that human services firms’ small IT budgets place limits on what eHana and its competitors can charge for their software. But the upside of this market is that only a small percentage of the human services organizations have adopted an EHR, leaving plenty of room for the tech vendors to gain new business, he said.
Interestingly, Buckley-Fortin and Lum have managed to find new customers largely by word-of-mouth, and the firm does not have a dedicated sales force. (Actually, the CEO says that he handles the firm’s sales activities with the help of engineers and product specialists.) “We really know the market and we know the organizations. We take the time go out to them and understand their needs,” he says.
EHana says that thousands of therapists, social workers, human services workers, and doctors use its software every day. But the company doesn’t reveal details on its sales or number of customers. Yet Buckley-Fortin did share some of the firm’s recent wins such as a recent contract to provide EHRs for Randolph, MA-based May Institute, a nationally known provider of behavioral health, education, and rehabilitation services with some 200 sites in more than a dozen states.
Wins like that should keep eHana and Buckley-Fortin around Boston for a while.
