From Honolulu to Back Bay: eHana Moving Behavioral Health Agencies from Paper to Pixel Records

Ryan McBride11/22/10Comments (3)

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Boston is a great place for bumping into people who are pushing the envelope in healthcare. In fact, the city’s leadership in health IT factored into Jacob Buckley-Fortin’s decision to expand his software firm eHana from its original home of Honolulu, HI, to Boston in 2006. Now Buckley-Fortin, the co-founder and CEO of eHana, is one of those people who you’ll bump into here in the Hub.

I met Buckley-Fortin at our Xconomy Xchange event in Boston in late September, after we had just watched a debate of sorts between Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush and eClinicalWorks CEO Girish Navani about the evolution of electronic health records. Buckley-Fortin, 31, knows a lot about this topic because his firm provides EHRs to human services and behavioral health providers—albeit at a smaller scale than what Watertown, MA-based Athena (NASDAQ:ATHN) and Westborough, MA-based eClinicalWorks do for hospitals and doctors’ practices.

In fact, it was interesting to learn more about how Buckley-Fortin and his co-founder Marcus Lum have carved out a successful niche in providing technology for behavioral health and human services organizations at Boston-based eHana (which still has an office in Hawaii too). For one, this segment of the healthcare market is largely ineligible for the $19 billion in stimulus funding designed to encourage U.S. doctors and hospitals to adopt EHR systems. Also, human services and behavioral health firms often operate with tight budgets that don’t leave a ton of room to spend on fancy IT systems.

Nevertheless, eHana has managed to grow profitably by serving the behavioral health and human services market, Buckley-Fortin says. While large companies such as Athena and eClinicalWorks chase after large deals with medical groups that are eligible for the stimulus funds, eHana is picking up new business from clinics and agencies that are overlooked by those bigger outfits. The firm, founded in 2000, also has a decade of experience in addressing the specific IT challenges that its bread-and-butter clients face.

“Behavioral health is a challenging niche,” Buckley-Fortin says. “I love challenging niches as an entrepreneur because it creates some natural barriers for my competition.”

Buckley-Fortin tells an interesting story about how his firm found its specialty. For starters, the CEO grew up in a family of social and human services professionals. His mother, Diana Buckley, ran a human services agency, PACT Hawaii, for children and families. And Fred Fortin, his father, has an advanced degree in social work and is a senior vice president of the Hawaii Medical Services Association. (Fred Fortin was instrumental in HMSA/Blue Cross Blue Shield Plan of Hawaii becoming the first health insurance provider to adopt Boston-based American Well’s online care software, Buckley-Fortin says.)

He and Lum made early inroads in their field with Care Hawaii, which provides behavioral health services across Hawaiian Islands. Because the organization was so geographically spread out, Buckley-Fortin says, his firm developed an Internet-based system for its health workers to manage their documentation and billing.

The company now has its own Web-based electronic health record and other applications that are tailored for this niche market. After adding some clients in Massachusetts, starting with Northampton, MA-based mental health and human services provider ServiceNet, eHana established an “awesome” working-living office near ServiceNet where staff from Hawaii could stay while working for the client. Though the 10-person company no longer has that nifty office near the Berkshires, the CEO says, it is now happily headquartered in Boston’s Back Bay.

While the firm is focused on a niche  market, there are still competitors that provide software for behavioral health customers such as Netsmart Technologies on Long Island and Lisle, IL-based Sequest Technologies. However, Buckley-Fortin says that his firm stands apart from its competitors with both certain aspects of its technology and its approach to service. For example, the company’s software is all Web-based and delivered as a service. Its technology also doesn’t require customers to make the same upfront investments in hardware they would need to run traditional client/server software.

There are certainly challenges to serving the behavioral health and human services market. John Moore, a health IT analyst and blogger at Chilmark Research in Cambridge, MA, says that human services firms’ small IT budgets place limits on what eHana and its competitors can charge for their software. But the upside of this market is that only a small percentage of the human services organizations have adopted an EHR, leaving plenty of room for the tech vendors to gain new business, he said.

Interestingly, Buckley-Fortin and Lum have managed to find new customers largely by word-of-mouth, and the firm does not have a dedicated sales force. (Actually, the CEO says that he handles the firm’s sales activities with the help of engineers and product specialists.) “We really know the market and we know the organizations. We take the time go out to them and understand their needs,” he says.

EHana says that thousands of therapists, social workers, human services workers, and doctors use its software every day. But the company doesn’t reveal details on its sales or number of customers. Yet Buckley-Fortin did share some of the firm’s recent wins such as a recent contract to provide EHRs for Randolph, MA-based May Institute, a nationally known provider of behavioral health, education, and rehabilitation services with some 200 sites in more than a dozen states.

Wins like that should keep eHana and Buckley-Fortin around Boston for a while.