NORTH GREENBUSH – A national technology company headquartered in the Rensselaer Technology Park has found its success through innovation — success that will pull them into the spotlight this afternoon during the Center for Economic Growth’s annual Technology Innovation Awards Luncheon.
Vikram and Vikash Agrawal are the president and chairman, respectively, of eTransmedia, a company that provides digital medical records services. By being at the forefront of the move to electronic medical records, their company has grown by leaps and bounds since their inception 13 years ago.
Begun as a startup in the RPI business incubator, eTransmedia now has more than 400 employees. Of those, about 70 are employed at its headquarters at 385 Jordan Road with the the rest spread across major locations in Boston, Mass.; Stamford, Conn.; Charlotte, N.C. and Phoenix, Ariz. Those employees service more than 12,000 physicians in 42 states, everyone from smallest practices to large hospitals and healthcare organizations. In the Capital District, their largest partnership is with Albany Medical Center.
“When we started, it was at the height of the dot-com era,” said Vikram. “From then on we have been offering our services in the cloud, so even when we were a small company, we were offering our services across the country.”
“Most of the vendors have largely serviced a local market, one within a 50 mile radius, in this industry,” said Vikash. “We did it differently because we began as an online software product that we could sell and then deploy.”
That success has been through offering a product early in the move to electronic medical records, and offering services that are more streamlined and efficient than their competitors. In the past several years, they have seen 25 percent growth. “We’ve been growing, not as much as we’d like, but it has been good growth,” said Vikram.
That growth has been aided by some state governments — New York among them — that have begun to provide incentives to encourage physicians to transition to electronic medical records. “Physicians are not amenable to change,” said Vikash. “They don’t want to change the way they practice medicine, so it always helps when the government steps in.”
In December, eTransmedia acquired MediStar, a 45 employee company based in Trumbull, Conn. However, its largest acquisition to date brought Hart Systems, a Boston-based company with 140 employees, into the company in 2011.
“A lot of our growth is happening when we acquire companies in other states, so for us to be able to move those jobs to New York State requires a lot of effort and investment,” said Vikram. “We definitely need help with that.”
As their company offers a digital product, they have had more of an opportunity to move their headquarters elsewhere; however, while they intend to stay in Rensselaer for the long term, they face a poor economic climate, said the president, especially in regards to the state’s high income taxes. If they stay, it could mean job growth at the company’s headquarters “As we are growing, based on opportunity, our plan is to be here for the longterm,” said Vikram. “We have some big plans and if those plans come to fruition, we’ll be double the size we are today next year.”
