match doctors with the technology that best fits their need. It won’t promote EMR purveyors to doctors for an inflated lead price, says Bhattacharjya. “We want it to be ethical,” says Bhattacharjya, though “it’s less profitable to do it that way.” That plays into the company’s broader mission of becoming a hub of all things EMR.
“Our idea is if we could build this as a platform vehicle, it’s a lot more interesting,” says Bhattacharjya. “We’re taking a very long-term approach to this.” So far, MedicalRecords.com has gotten about 7 percent of electronic medical records providers to agree to buy its leads.
About a year and a half ago, Bhattacharjya left his gig in marketing at Athlete’s Performance, a company offering athletic training services via corporate wellness programs, to start MedicalRecords.com. He initially seeded it with $200,000 of his own money. The startup now has about 60 percent of a targeted $500,000 funding round committed, from angel investors including Ty Danco and Peter Bordes. (MedicalRecords’ landlord Avalon is not an investor, though.) Mark Slater, an investment banking veteran who helped take companies like ATG and Internet.com public while working for Hambrecht & Quist, is MedicalRecords’ chief revenue and partnership officer.
Last January, MedicalRecords.com went live with its EMR database and started collecting doctors’ information that it passed on for free to software makers. In August it started selling the leads. The company plans to serve as a lead-generation platform for other software purchases doctors may make down the line, like electronic insurance claims management. MedicalRecords also will buy the information from other sites that get inquiries from doctors seeking EMR information—as a sort of affiliate marketing business.
The next lead generation function MedicalRecords.com will roll out is in the education sector. The company says it will take inquiries from people looking for information on becoming certified EMR technicians, and will sell those leads at $50 to $75 a pop to send the information to schools offering the training programs.
The startup has three team members in Boston (Bhattacharjya, Slater, and Blue Cross Blue Shield veteran Arjun Maini), two in New York, and one in Seattle. And it has no immediate plans to raise a big venture round, as lead generation is a very capital-efficient business, says Bhattacharjya. But it does have plans to become very big.
“There are 400 vendors” in electronic medical records software, with new ones sprouting up all the time, says Bhattacharjya. “It’s like a gold rush.”
