Friday, June 20, 2008

MedVentive’s growth prompts move to Waltham

By Ryan McBride

A Cambridge health-care IT company plans to relocate to Waltham in August, driven by growth in its sales staff and executive team.

MedVentive Inc., which provides software products intended to improve care for patients, has seen its business expand in recent years from one customer in Boston to more than a dozen medical centers across the nation, company officials said. An industry official said Massachusetts is well-positioned to sprout such companies.

Late last month the company raised $3.6 million in a Series B round of venture capital financing for expansion of its sales and marketing staff and new product development, said Nancy Ham, president of MedVentive. She said the firm employs more than 70 people — up 28 percent from when the firm launched three years ago — and has four open positions advertised.

“We’re really starting to rock n’ roll,” said Ham, who joined the company in March.

Previous VCs, HLM Venture Partners of Boston and Long River Ventures in Hadley, contributed to the second round of funding. Both firms raised $4 million for MedVentive in 2006.

Though technically a startup, MedVentive is not your typical Series B-stage company. It began in 1997 as Care Group Medical Services Organization LLC, a health IT unit of CareGroup Healthcare Systems, the group that manages Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. MedVentive spun out as an independent firm in May 2005, with products several years in the making and one large customer in CareGroup.

Specifically, MedVentive markets subscription-based software to analyze medical records and related information to, say, automate physician intervention for diabetics who fail to get their blood tested on time or to measure the overall quality of care a doctor provides her patients, to name two of many uses of the products.

Now with more than 20 medical centers and health-care payers as customers, MedVentive has attracted health-care IT veterans to its executive team. Ham, for one, is a former president of Sentillion Inc., an Andover-based provider of identity and access management software mostly to hospitals and medical practices. Her prior positions include general manager of Healtheon, which merged with WebMD Health Corp. of New York in 1999.

Over the past year MedVentive also has added former consultant David Magnan as chief operating officer and Chris Bishop as vice president of sales and marketing. (Jonathan Niloff, a physician and professor at Harvard Medical School, has been CEO of MedVentive since 2000.)

“Because Massachusetts has some of the strongest health-care providers and some of the highest integrity payers, we’re well-positioned to lead in the development of products (to enable clinical decision support) that would be well-regarded nationally,” said Christopher Gabrieli, a VC and chairman of the Massachusetts Health Data Consortium.