By Nancy Dahlberg / ndahlberg@miamiherald.com
CareCloud’s offices are nearly doubling in size at Blue Lagoon, expanding to 25,000 square feet, to support the fast-growing healthcare technology company that will soon surpass 300 employees. The new sign atop the 12-floor office building, visible to planes arriving and departing Miami International Airport, went up last month, a prominent symbol for this homegrown company.
“The last year has been a big year for us. We grew another 100 percent. We sold in excess of 500 new medical practices, ranging from very small to pretty large. We’re thinking we’ll double again this year,” said Albert Santalo, the CEO and founder of CareCloud, which provides cloud-based practice management, electronic health record and medical billing software and services for doctors. “We raised another $30 million in capital this year... Lots of key hires throughout the company (including a head of engineering from ConstantContact) — our headcount grew by about 80 people. We’ve ramped up the sales team 35 to 40 percent in the latter part of the year. Across the whole company, we’ve been ramping.”
Last summer CareCloud announced it closed its Series B round of more than $29 million, bringing the total VC investment in the company to $55 million. The company has also rolled out new products, including Companion, the first mobile product for doctors built for the iPad Mini and iOS7, and an updated version of Charts, its EHR product that sailed through certification, Santalo said. It partnered with ZocDoc, a doctor appointment booking startup, and cloud-storage specialist Box, representing the next phase for CareCloud as it opens up the platform beyond electronic health records.
The company last year also opened an office in Boston, the leading hub of healthcare IT, so “we can tap into that brain trust,” Santalo said. Boston’s office houses mainly engineering, product management and product marketing for CareCloud. Miami still houses two-thirds of engineering as well as operations, sales leadership, client services, finance and HR. As of the end of 2013, CareCloud had 262 employees, with 196 of them in Miami, 29 in Boston, and the rest in Salt Lake City and sprinkled around the country. And it’s hiring.
Last week, the company announced a new partnership with the University of Miami School of Business Administration. Through the CareCloud Scholars program, 100 graduate students will get free admission to the University of Miami’s prestigious healthcare conference titled “The Business of Health Care: Bending the Cost Curve” on Friday, and some of them will continue as CareCloud interns. To compete for the fellowships, the entrants wrote essays about the state of healthcare and Miami’s future in the industry.
CareCloud also has a partnership with FIU’s master’s of science program in Health Informatics and Management Systems. “I’ve been shocked by how many people go to engineering school here and then leave. It’s crazy, we have really really intelligent people here and we lose that brain power every year — they move to Silicon Valley or the Northeast,” said Santalo. “A lot of those kids would rather stay and work at a company like CareCloud. That’s why we are trying to put our tentacles in the universities to make them aware of what we are doing. Kids don’t need to leave Miami.”
The Miami Herald talked to Santalo in his Blue Lagoon headquarters on the first working day of the new year to get an update on CareCloud, the company’s educational initiatives and his views on Miami’s place in the technology universe. Read on.