SM: If you are able to pull in 600 doctors’ offices a month, I imagine that a lot of that is happening on its own. BB: We have to spend about 15 to 20 minutes on the phone with each new office to teach them how to use the system.
SM: Where do you go from here? There are about 700,000 physicians in the United States, and you have reached about 35,000 of them. What percentage of that available market has a solution like yours? BB: Most of them have practice management systems. The problem is, we know based on the information we receive from
SM: What was the early financing of the company? When did you raise money? BB: The first money I raised was in 1995. That took us through five months. I did not take a salary for the first year and a half of the company. We raised $100,000 with the first group in 1994 and
SM: You said that your target office is the small doctor’s office, yet you work with insurance companies. Your technology fills the gap between the two, but which one did you target from a strategic perspective? BB: From 1998 on, insurance companies’ Web sites became more visible and prevalent. We were on the Oxford Health
SM: You essentially act as a translator between physicians’ offices and all of the various insurance companies because you can present insurance forms in each company’s preferred format. Is that a fair assessment? BB: Yes, that is accurate.
SM: In 1995, when you were starting MD On-Line, you were on your own. Who did you have to actually build the technology, and how did you find them? BB: The first programmer I hired was Alan Sagan. I met him through a mutual friend. He is the nephew of Carl Sagan. He owned a
Bill Bartzak founded MD On-Line, Inc. in 1995. Today, the company is one of the fastest-growing technology firms in the country, having been named to Inc. magazine’s Inc 500 in 2004, the Deloitte Technology Fast 500, and the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 in New Jersey. Bartzak has a strong background of bootstrapped startup ventures in