In the end, Patel did the computer fix — and it changed the course of his career. While visiting the clinic, Patel asked about the facility’s records management software. In response, he got a tour of a medical records office filled with piles of paper — “a dungeon at best” –which brought to life one of the bigger problems in health care management. “I said, ‘If I was a patient here, I wouldn’t like my records managed in this way,’ ” Patel says. Today, as the founder and CTO of ChartOne, patient records are his full-time occupation, and fighting the health care industry’s ingrained paper culture is his continuing passion. Adding to that challenge are new government regulations designed to protect patient privacy. “Health care is very fragmented as an industry,” Patel says. “While we do space-age surgery in the OR, the support systems that maintain the health care enterprise are fairly outdated.” Started as HCC (Hospital Correspondence Corp.) two decades ago, ChartOne has always made hospital records management its core business. Now ChartOne offers a range of services designed to give authorized users secure and simultaneous access to patient chart information. That service now includes an online records management application, called View Manager. Allowing hospitals to scan chart documents and then retrieve them digitally, View Manager receives rave reviews from Brook Thomas, CFO of the Sebring, Fla.-based acute care hospital Highlands Regional Medical Center. The hospital became a beta user for the application in July 2001. “It was just as though it was the original document,” Thomas says of the scanned chart copy quality. “The long and short of it is that application works just the way they say it does, and they backed it up with people.” Because the technology landscape has evolved, Patel sees ChartOne evolving into a Web service. “Web services are great because you can knock out new things very rapidly,” he says. This evolution quickly became apparent to Patel’s IT team, but company executives had to be brought into the loop. “We snuck it in backward,” Patel says. “We just created a product that did the job. It was never clear to them how it did it. But it was clear to them it was a Web product.” In the past six months, Patel says his team got the executive team on board, and the execs understand exactly what Web services mean. “They’ve been rejuvenated in the value proposition of what we’ve created here,” Patel says. Outside of the technology realm, privacy is a huge concern for clients, especially in light of new laws that require protection of patient privacy. To safeguard patient records, ChartOne has an elaborate system of checks and balances. “We can monitor down to the page what you saw,” Patel says. Patel also hires a team of outside hackers to test the system. “I ask them to go and hack me when I don’t expect it,” Patel says. “Internally, we know where our stuff is so it’s a false positive. It’s better that somebody external does it who doesn’t know much about us internally.” Today, Patel looks back fondly on the moment when he didn’t know much about the internal workings of the health care industry, and reluctantly answered that tech support call as a favor. “It was a great call. It was the best sales call I ever made,” he says. Software Development