Keeping medical clients with house calls, bedside manners
By DAVID GURLIACCI
A White Plains computer services company gets half of its revenue in the rapidly growing business of selling medical software, but the president of the company is quick to say that its explosive growth has another cause.
"Our company's success is directly attributable to the relationships we have with our customers," said Jack Mortell, co-owner and president of Professional Data Systems Inc. (PDS). Customers like the service they get, they buy more from the company and refer others to it, that's how the company has doubled its revenues, he said.
Mortell said his technicians, salespeople and others in the company have made an effort to understand how physicians' offices work, what their needs are and how PDS can be useful to them, almost like an extension of the doctor's office.
The company helps doctors' offices and other businesses buy, install and learn to use computers, and it helps set up, monitor and maintain computer systems, Mortell said. PDS also sells medical software, installs it and trains workers to use it.
Often a physician's office will both buy software from the company and hire it to monitor computer systems, which need to be reliable for doctors to help patients effectively, he said.
"I think the difference between them and other companies that monitor computers is they actually come when you call," said Betty Lander, practice administrator for Somers Orthopaedics Surgery & Sports Medicine Group in Carmel.
"They actually understand what we're talking about in the medical field, not just the computer side," Lander said. "They actually understand what goes on in this office, the flow of the paperwork and the flow of the patients."
Last year PDS grew 104 percent, to $1.2 million in annual revenue, Mortell said. "We're bursting at the seams."
The company's growth is "not out of place" in the medical software industry, said Divan Dave, chief executive officer of OmniMD™, a Tarrytown company that creates and sells software for use by doctors and health-care organizations. Dave added, "One hundred percent is not a bad number, it's not one that everybody is achieving. It's definitely a good rate of growth."
Prodded by the federal government, doctors and hospitals are turning more and more to computers to store medical records and even print out patient prescriptions, he said.
Most of Professional Data System's growth comes from referrals or from customers doing more business with the company, Mortell said.
Although technological advances increasingly allow maintenance functions to be done from Professional Data System's own offices, the company still likes to send out technicians to make house calls at its clients' offices.
Face Time
In part, the visits just keep good relations with customers, which helps keep the customers renewing the maintenance service, said Tom Telesca, vice president for operations and a co-owner of the company. The importance of those visits also means that the company is careful to hire "technicians with a personality," Mortell said. Doctors appreciate the concept as well and even have a technical term for it, "a good bedside manner."
The son of John F. Mortell, who previously ran Physician Computer Network Inc., a New Jersey company that provided practice management software for doctors, Jack Mortell grew up in Chappaqua. Across the street from him was Telesca, a friend of his since they were in fifth grade together.
After college, Mortell got a job in Fairfield County, Conn., selling medical software in Westchester County for Warwick, R.I.-based G. Barry & Associates Inc.
The doctors who bought the software often wanted help buying compatible hardware to run it, Mortell said, so he set up his own business to sell the equipment and set it up in their offices. Professional Data Systems was born in the basement of his home, then in Mount Kisco.
The company got a boost in the run-up to the year 2000, he said, because doctors' computers, like many others, needed to be able to avoid the Y2K problem, since old software programs didn't distinguish between different centuries, computers that might act as if dates in the new millennium were older than the dates at the end of the last century. The demand gave a boost to both hardware and software providers.
TOM & JACK
"Three months into the year 2000 I was working 80-hour weeks," Mortell said. To keep the company growing after the Y2K demand slackened off, he branched out into providing computer maintenance.
In 2001, Telesca joined PDS as a partner. When each was asked what annoyed him most about the other, Telesca said Mortell "never gets stressed," and Mortell added: "I'm very relaxed, laid back, and he's a cross-the-t, dot-the-i, Type A personality. But it works. That's how we balance each other."
Today, the company has about 375 customers, some as far north as Albany, but 90 percent of them are in the metropolitan area, Telesca said.
A couple of months ago PDS started an "off-site replication" service in which doctors' offices copy their records to a secure server in another location, Telesca said. A major near-term goal for the company is getting more clients to start using that service, he added.
Before the end of the year, Professional Data Systems will also have a service for off-site, electronic storage of old medical charts and other patient information, Mortell said.
"Because we have good relationships with our customers," he said, "we can go to them and offer that product."
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