Medical Systems Company Falls Back into Hands of Original Founder

(Reprinted from Mass High Tech)

Interbit Data, a Framingham software company that helps hospitals transfer encrypted patient data via the Internet, was formed, sold and bought back by its founder Arthur Young in less than five years.

Young, who spent 10 years of his career as a social worker, moved into high tech when he took a sales position for MEDITECH, a Westwood-based company that develops health care systems. After several years there, he ventured off on his own.

In 1997 Young formed Medical Systems Solutions out of his Holliston basement with $100,000 of his own capital and began marketing his first product, Secure Access. “The product was geared toward allowing users outside of the hospital to securely gain access to patient, clinical and financial data,” Young said.

Medical Systems Solutions’ first customer was Jordan Hospital in Plymouth.

“We continued to grow,” Young said, “and in the process of selling products to a company in California, they came back to us and asked ‘What if we buy the company?’”

Young agreed to the $500,000 acquisition by MC Informatics, a California-based medical consulting and software development company. Young became its vice president of Web communications and led a sales division in the Bay State. “They had about 80 people and there was rapid growth,” he said.

By 2000, MC reached 110 employees, but soon afterward, the consulting industry took a downfall.
“The short story is the company cycled downward and we were the only division making money,” Young said.

He said MC Informatics did not have the resources to sustain its sales growth and ultimately closed its doors in March 2001. After that happened, Young purchased all of the assets, started developing more products and renamed the company Interbit Data.

Today, the three-person startup supplies a suite of software products to hospitals that use secure Internet connections instead of dial-in lines to distribute patient data to physicians outside the hospital.

Interbit has signed on more than 100 customers including Beverly Hospital, New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, and Stratford General Hospital in Ontario.

New York Eye and Ear Infirmary is using Interbit’s NetAccess product, which enables users outside the hospital to connect to hospital systems via the Internet.

NetAccess creates an encrypted connection with a client outside the hospital to a validation server inside the hospital. The remote session then is decrypted and passed from the validation server to a host.

Young said several users could be connected via a single client connection.

Interbit focuses on the medical field because the marketplace is risk-averse, doesn’t have the resources to experiment with different technologies and will need technical help because of the new regulations being brought on by the Health Insurance and Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

“We’ll be rolling (NetAccess) out to our doctors soon for encrypted remote access to meet HIPAA requirements,” said Michael Rozmos, vice president of information services for Calvert Memorial Hospital in Maryland.

Calvert is also using Interbit’s MPrint, a program that allows the customers to print files from the hard drive or share PC-attached printers with other users.

Interbit’s NetPrint, another product, gives health care organizations the ability to print reports to remote users and to retrieve them through encrypted links using the Internet.

“If Dr. Smith wants a copy of your lab report, the hospital lab says your report is available (via an e-mail) and all (Dr. Smith) has to do is click on the link,” Young explained.

“It enhances security and reduces error because computers may not be smart but they do have a good memory,” Young said, “and it enhances accuracy and can speed up the access.”