San Diego Health IT Startup, Cognitive Medical Systems, Recruits DefenseWeb CEO

Cognitive Medical Systems, a previously unknown health IT startup based in San Diego, is today naming local software industry veteran Douglas Burke as president—and employee No. 4.

Burke, who was previously the CEO of San Diego-based DefenseWeb Technologies, announced the move in an e-mail blast to his professional contacts yesterday.

Mary Lacroix, a longtime health IT executive and chief operating officer for the U.S. Navy’s Center For Personal and Professional Development in San Diego, founded Cognitive Medical Systems here last year. The company says it provides a range of services to military health IT programs, including consulting, program administration, project management, software engineering, and database design. The San Diego startup is not related to Cogmed Cognitive Medical Systems AB, based in Stockholm, Sweden.

The idea was to help the government bridge the disparate health IT systems that have been created under various military programs, Lacroix said. “We’re creating software interfaces between existing legacy systems and all the providers,” she said. The company says it is primarily targeting the Department of Defense, Veteran’s Administration, and Indian Health Service as customers.

“Healthcare [IT] today is very similar to the banking systems of the 1970s,” says Burke (right). “There are lots of legacy systems that are not connected together.” The startup’s software is intended to meet interoperability requirements the government has been establishing since 2008 for the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN). The government conceived the NHIN to operate as a “network of networks” that will connect different organizations that need to exchange health information, such as state and regional health information exchanges, integrated delivery systems, health plans, federal agencies, and others. A number of federal agencies have been working to adopt standards-based technologies and integrate military health IT systems into the NHIN.

Cognitive Medical Systems has been self-funded so far. “In my opinion, the only way to build a company these days is by doing it the bootstrapping way,” Burke said.

Burke, an enterprise software executive, joined DefenseWeb as CEO in 2003 and continued to manage the business after Louisville, KY-based Humana acquired the privately held company for an undisclosed amount in 2007. He was previously the CEO of San Diego-based Prodesis, and served as an executive at HNC Software and SAIC. Operating under a variety of government contracts, DefenseWeb provides Web-based software and online services for military families, enabling them to form online communities, share information, exchange e-mail, and get online counseling, among other things.

Tim McClain, president and CEO of Humana Veterans Healthcare Services in Louisville, KY, has been named as DefenseWeb’s interim CEO.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.