Updox Grows 3X Year-to-Year, Creates Dozens of Ohio-based Jobs
The story of Updox in 2014 is a story of a new company that more than doubled its business, with nearly 3X year-over-year growth from 2013 to 2014.
“We have close to 20 million patients in our data base and about 100,000 users on our system,” said Michael Morgan, Updox CEO. “It’s a great testament to the growth and adoption of technology in healthcare.”
Updox is at the forefront of an accelerating industry trend.
“Medical practices today are challenged with maximizing any and all opportunities to provide outstanding care while lowering costs, improving efficiencies, and exceeding levels of customer service,” said Morgan.
Updox is leading the transformation in healthcare through relationship management, collaboration, and networking across all components of healthcare providers and partners.
The industry leader for physician connectivity and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, Updox helps physicians manage patient relationships via the web, including secure messaging, appointment scheduling, payments, and structured communications to manage a patient’s health.
In addition, Updox helps physicians collaborate with each other on referrals, marketing, and secure messaging.
“Updox gives physicians the tools and resources to do that so that their practices don’t just survive the current healthcare climate but thrive,” Morgan said. “Our solutions support not just maintaining the business but finding new ways to deliver care, expand services and increase profits. That’s what we promise.”
This company understood its market and invested time and resources early to create a physician connectivity platform that solved real operational problems for doctors and their staffs.
Updox then built strategic distribution partnerships with more than 45 electronic health record (EHR) vendors representing 150,000 physicians who selected Updox as their exclusive partner for secure messaging and communications.
Expanding on these key customer and distribution relationships and leveraging their own industry expertise and vision, Updox has built an integrated communications system that drives collaboration between physicians and engages patients, in other words, customer relationship management.
“Physicians are starting to adopt technology to help them communicate with patients and other providers electronically,” Morgan said. “A year ago, this was driven to avoid government penalties and to receive reimbursement for services. Now we’re seeing a clear shift that physicians realize the benefits that technology provides beyond the government mandates.”
Morgan says that increasingly physicians in independent practice are seeing the benefits of action more like a business—in the good ways.
“Our technology helps a medical practice improve customer satisfaction,” he said. “The independent physicians using Updox can communicate with patients via our patient portal and then use that tool to maximize those relationships and grow their businesses This is a true move to CRM in healthcare, to think of the relationship with customers and optimize those to communicate with the patient in the way the patient wants and to provide better care.”
“This is a very exciting opportunity to make physicians’ businesses stronger and their patients happier through building better relationships,” Morgan said. “The concept of communicating through the rest of the healthcare ecosystem is really important.”
Updox was an early provider of Direct Secure Email (an encryption standard) for physicians, and Morgan sees applications in other parts of the healthcare ecosystem for more advanced services.
“That’s where we see the next evolution,” he said. “Physician-to-physician and physician-to-patient communication is great. It will be exponentially more powerful when the rest of the ecosystem connects.”
More good news about Updox: The company is a job creator, currently at 29 employees and heading toward two times that.
Last year, Updox invested heavily in business development and technology people and rounding out the management team.
“One thing we’ve emphasized,” Morgan said, “is bringing in a group of people, specifically management, who have been successful at other companies, large and small, that have grown—people who focus hard on metrics.”
Morgan expects the business to double in 2015 and anticipates adding another 20-plus new positions in sales and marketing, customer support, and finance. Many of those hires are likely to come in the first half of the year.
Just to put that in perspective, in 2009, Updox was three founders with a great technology concept. At the end of 2012, there were eight employees.
Updox is a great example why startups are so vital to the entire economy—from eight to nearly 50 Ohio jobs—in less than 36 months.
Imagine if our region had 50 new companies with the potential of an Updox starting every year.
At Rev1, that’s why we do what do—accelerate, advise, and fund young companies.
If you have an idea or a startup, contact us.
