Scaling a mountain, even a figurative one, sometimes requires making changes on the fly.
Catalyze, an early-stage healthtech company based in Madison, WI, previously used a mountaineering theme when choosing names for its primary software applications. It chose the climbing term Redpoint for its health data integration product, while its hosting and compliance offering was called Stratum.
Now the startup says it has scrapped those labels and changed the name of the company itself, from Catalyze to Datica.
In a blog post on Datica’s website, co-founder and CEO Travis Good writes that his company spent nearly three years trying to trademark “Catalyze,” but those efforts were unsuccessful. Attempts to purchase the domain Catalyze.com were also fruitless. The owner was “unwilling to sell at any price,” Good writes.
According to the legal website Justia, the company filed a trademark application for “Datica” in November.
Marcia Noyes, Datica’s director of communications, says that the company anticipates it will the receive the trademark later this year and is not “expecting any major roadblocks.”
Another reason for the change is that a number of healthcare organizations and initiatives have “catalyze” or “catalyst” in their names, Noyes says. They include the Salt Lake City-based company Health Catalyst, as well as Health Catalyst Capital Management, a venture fund based in New York.
“Our name got diluted,” Noyes says. “We were getting mixed up with other companies and organizations.”
Redpoint, which brokers connections so that healthcare software developers can get data into and out of electronic health records systems at hospitals and clinics, is now called “Managed Integration.”
Stratum will henceforth be known as “Compliant Cloud.” That product is aimed at helping clients access servers and databases in a way that’s compliant with HIPAA, a federal law that regulates the use, disclosure, and transmission of protected patient health information.
Datica has raised more than $12.5 million in outside financing since launching in 2013. That total includes a $6.5 million Series B equity funding round, which closed in September.
The startup says it has more than 100 customers. Some of them are healthcare providers, such as the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Hurley Medical Center in Flint, MI. Other clients include Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: [[ticker:JNJ]]) and UnitedHealthcare (NYSE: [[ticker:UNH]]), which are giants in the pharmaceuticals and health insurance industries, respectively.
According to Good’s blog post, Datica has made significant progress during the relatively brief span it has been in business. But he writes that hospitals and digital health companies are still a long way from the summit when it comes to exchanging data.
“True interoperability is years, if not decades, away from realization,” Good writes. “We don’t pretend to think Datica or anyone else has a silver bullet for absolute interoperability, but connecting vendors and solutions to health systems is how innovation happens.”
