[Clarified. 2 pm Eastern time, 1/25/11. See below.] Dossia’s new chief executive, Michael Critelli, has plans to push personal electronic health records closer to mainstream use. He needs money, though. And that might mean tapping the capital markets.
Cambridge, MA-based Dossia is best known as a nonprofit consortium—with founding members such as BP America, Intel, Pitney Bowes, and Wal-Mart—that got started in 2006 to provide personally-controlled digital health records to employees of its member companies. Yet there is also a for-profit company affiliated with the group, giving Dossia the ability to issue shares and raise money to expand.
Dossia has been generating revenue from the companies whose employees use its records for more than two years, Critelli says, but that money doesn’t cover all of its expenses.
Critelli, the former chairman of and CEO of Pitney Bowes, says that he is now talking to outside investors as well as Dossia’s members to raise new funds for the group in the first half of this year. (The group wouldn’t disclose how much it plans to raise.) He says his first preference would be to raise the money from the founding companies, which have already committed $15 million to the group.
“Given where we want Dossia to go and what we want it to be, we will need additional capital,” Critelli says. “We need to build capability in advance of getting revenue to pay for it.”
So far Dossia’s personal digitized health records have only been deployed for six of 10 of its consortium members. To date, a bunch of factors have slowed the rollout. Dossia had a messy breakup with its early technology partner, Omnimedix. Later, the group had to further develop the electronic records platform it adopted from Children’s Hospital in Boston to meet the needs of its member companies. And factors such as key personnel changes and reorganizations at some of the Dossia member companies have slowed their adoption of the records, Critelli says.
Alas, Colin Evans, the previous chief executive of Dossia, was unable to reach his goal of getting all the group’s founding members onto the system during his stint with the group, as he told me he wanted to in November 2009. Yet Evans did at least lead the group during a period of relatively rapid adoption. Only Wal-Mart, which was the first company to deploy the records, was up and running on Dossia’s technology when Evans took leadership as CEO of the group in 2009. When Critelli took over for Evans last month, there were
