Startup of the Day - Nimbus Health

The company of the day is Nimbus Health, LLC, based in the US. They provide SaaS solutions helping healthcare providers to share medical records with patients. You will find below an interview with Terry Wilcox, the CEO of Nimbus Health, LLC. All the best to them and congrats for being the startup of the day.

Website: www.nimbushealth.com.

Interview with Terry Wilcox, the CEO of Nimbus Health, LLC

Who are you?

I’m Terry Wilcox, the CEO of Nimbus Health, LLC. We provide SaaS solutions helping healthcare providers, like doctors and hospitals, share medical records with patients, specialists, auditors, etc. whether they’re in paper form, fully electronic, or a combination of the two.

How do you feel being the most promising ‘company of the day’ per Microsoft?

We are very excited to be considered as a promising company of the day by Microsoft. We see this as a great opportunity to showcase our company and our product to a broad community beyond the healthcare industry.

What did you do before creating your company?

My partner and I have diverse, but complimentary backgrounds. For the past 20 years, I have worked as a Systems Analysts and Project Manager for various healthcare corporations. My partner and our CTO, Justin Wilcox has a background in technology and was an engineer at Microsoft for 5 years. The combination of our work experience incorporates extensive expertise of the healthcare industry and state of the art technology.

How did you get the idea? What s the genesis?

Healthcare has been extremely slow in making the transition from paper to electronic medical records. Even for those healthcare providers that do have some form of electronic medical records, many still have some paper as part of the patient’s medical file. Our product idea came from the need to be able to view and share medical records, regardless of the format of those records.

What do you sell? What is your company’s mission?

Our flagship software is the Breeze Medical System. This software allows users to scan paper-based documents, transfer electronic medical records or upload a combination of both paper and electronic records to our secure server. Once on our server, these records can then be viewed by authorized users. Our mission is to provide a state of the art secure software solution that enables the sharing of medical records between authorized users.

What is your market?

While this technology can benefit any “paper heavy” industry we are focused primarily on the healthcare industry. We target consulting firms, hospitals, physicians and insurance companies that need to be able to view medical records in a remote setting. The types of projects were Breeze would be beneficial includes remote auditing, coding, release of information or long term storage scenarios.

Funding history? VCs? BA?

We are self funded and may look to angel investors in the future.

Growth? Internationalization?

Our current growth model is based on national clients, rather than international.

How many employees do you have? How many developers?

We have two members of our executive team and three contracted developers.

Are you hiring? If yes, what? Where?

We’re currently not hiring at this time, however we anticipate adding marketing personnel in 2010.

Which platform are you building on? Why?

We’re leveraging the Microsoft stack for a couple reasons. Firstly, our CTO, having worked on Windows server, has extensive experience with the .Net platform. WCF’s secure messaging capabilities and ASP .Net’s large community have also been tremendously helpful in building out our solutions.

We’re also leveraging a couple great open source projects, namely NHibernate and jQuery, as well as some cloud based services.

Do you have any Software IP? Is there something that you’re the only one to do on the market?

With the increased focus on and transition to electronic medical records, our hybrid solution of both electronic and paper medical provides a unique solution that other vendors are currently not offering.

Where do you see opportunities today in the Software/internet areas?

While there are many large and established players in the healthcare space, most have not yet made the transition to the internet. Many of the traditional healthcare software solutions are currently not interoperable, so providing healthcare providers a cost effective solution for storing, maintaining and sharing patient health information with other healthcare providers adds great value to both healthcare providers and patients.

Looking for funding? If yes, how much?

At this time we’re not looking for funding

What about the BizSpark Program? What do you think? Are you going to join? Why?

To be perfectly honest, we love the BizSpark program. Leveraging BizSpark for our web and database servers has been extremely helpful. It’s also enabled us to experiment with new technologies that otherwise we wouldn’t have thought to (e.g. Microsoft Dynamics, Expressions, etc.).

The support services BizSpark offers have also come in handy. At one point we couldn’t properly configure SQL for mirroring with a witness. After we cashed in one of our support tickets, we were able to get it going out.

I would, and I have, highly recommend BizSpark to anyone else interested in it.

Any advice to young Software entrepreneurs?

Read “The Four steps to the Epiphany” before you start building anything. Thoroughly research you customer’s needs and find a compelling problem that needs to be solved for the largest group of customers possible. Develop your software based on what your customers want, not on what you think they want or on what you want to build.

Anything else you’d like to say?

Build your company and product with passion, innovative ideas, and integrity. Part of the joy and excitement of being an entrepreneur is blazing your own path. If you’re passionate and innovative about your products or services, that will be attract new customers. If you have integrity that will help you keep your customers.