Drchrono entrepreneur sees health IT incubators as fueling 'new Renaissance'

Entrepreneur Daniel Kivatinos praises the health IT accelerator/incubator movement. Innovations in the healthcare IT investment world today are nothing short of “sort of a new Renaissance,” helping firms like his get established and grow, he says.

Kivatinos and his five-person company have reason to praise the incubator movement. Incubators have been very, very good to him. Indeed, his positive experiences could serve as an encouraging road map for other healthcare IT providers wondering if incubators can help them.

Kivatinos pulled up stakes from New York in January 2011 to move his then-2-year-old startup, Drchrono, developer of an iPad-based electronic health-record system, to Mountain View, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley.

The relocation came at the invitation of Y Combinator, a pioneering and pre-eminent health technology seed accelerator. Drchrono became its first health IT company and in so doing received $20,000 in seed money and the opportunity to go through Y Combinator's prized, three-month mentoring program, Kivatinos said.

About a month later, he and his Drchrono team also were recruited to join the inaugural class of San Francisco-based Rock Health, one of the founding incubators devoted exclusively to helping and promoting enterprising, new health IT firms.

Then, a pair of Silicon Valley investors bankrolling an investment vehicle called the Start Fund offered $150,000 in “angel” funding to each of 40 or so firms in Kivatinos' Y Combinator class. It was, “for us, a huge amount of money at the time,” Kivatinos said.

Finally, Kivatinos heard about 500 Startups, another Mountain View accelerator, and thought, why not? He pitched to 500 Start Ups and was accepted into its mentoring program as well.

Since then, Kivatinos said, his firm has raised more than $4 million in investment funds and “we're generating a large amount of revenue.” Its EHR is tied at 110th out of 455 developers of complete EHRs used by physicians and other eligible professionals in ambulatory care for having customers receive payment under the federal EHR incentive payment program, according to data from CMS through Dec. 12. That puts Drchrono in the upper 25% of a very crowded field.

“I would say, given the chance, we would have done it again, 100%,” Kivatinos said of his incubator experiences.

“The resources you get are very hard to get, doing it alone, in a very small amount of time. We found a large number of investors and a large amount of developers” by going the accelerator/incubator route, he said.

Follow Joseph Conn on Twitter: @MHJConn