Founded in 2000, DocuTAP offers EHR and practice management software to digitalize urgent care clinic processes, removing the need for manual paper documentation by administrators, nurses, and physicians. DocuTAP’s distinguishing feature is its easy-to-implement, web-based platform which can be used directly on mobile tablets. Streamlining patient care and physician efficiency, DocuTAP offers customizable templates, automated analytics, and valuable reporting information. DocuTAP also offers convenient revenue cycle services for billing and collections.

“The DocuTAP team and I are excited to welcome Bessemer to the family,” said Eric McDonald, Founder and CEO of DocuTAP. “Bessemer has a proven track record of working with fast growing technology companies that are both innovators and leaders in their respective fields. This funding is a testament to our company’s commitment to client success and passion for delivering innovative healthcare solutions.”

“Urgent care is one of the fastest growing sectors within the healthcare marketplace and we are excited to be investing in DocuTAP, the leading EHR and practice management platforms serving the urgent care market,” said Steve Kraus, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “Bessemer’s history of successfully investing in both vertical SaaS solutions and healthcare companies gives us the unique knowledge and expertise to help Eric and the DocuTAP team to continue to build on the platform.”

About DocuTAP

DocuTAP provides urgent care practices with an innovative approach to workflow management. Its flagship product, DocuTAP’s EHR and Practice Management software, fully integrates practice management and electronic health records capabilities in one complete system. DocuTAP software features automated and customizable tools that enhance healthcare providers’ ability to deliver and manage patient care. Our experienced, knowledgeable staff is committed to improving the delivery of high-quality healthcare. For more information, call (877) 697-4696 or visit www.docutap.com.

About Bessemer Venture Partners 

With $4.0 billion under management, Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) is a global venture capital firm with offices in Silicon Valley, Cambridge, Mass., New York, Mumbai, Bangalore and Herzliya, Israel. BVP delivers a broad platform in venture capital spanning industries, geographies, and stages of company growth. From Staples to Skype, VeriSign to Yelp, LinkedIn to Pinterest, BVP has helped incubate and support companies that have anchored significant shifts in the economy. More than 100 BVP-funded companies have gone public on exchanges in North America, Europe and Asia. See www.bvp.com or follow BVP on Twitter: @bessemervp

About Bluff Point Associates

Bluff Point Associates is a private equity firm based in Westport, Connecticut. Bluff Point actively invests in information services companies supporting the banking, trust, securities, retirement and wealth management sectors of the financial services industry, as well as the healthcare information services sector. Bluff Point’s team collectively has decades of experience in recognizing a company’s growth potential and working with its management to reach that potential. For more information, visit www.bluffpt.com.

Hansen was honored with the Excellence in Economic Development Award, which is given out annually at the Governor’s Economic Development Conference. “Bill Hansen helped lead the charge to save Centerville’s nursing home and the jobs it provides,” Gov. Daugaard said. “Citizens who have worked with Bill say he has energized the local business community, service clubs and city leaders, as well as the Development Corporation and its board members with his ‘spark’ for economic development in Centerville and the surrounding area”

Eric McDonald, CEO of DocuTAP, was named the South Dakota Entrepreneur of the Year. The award is a new one. “It is fitting that Eric McDonald is the first recipient of this award as he also competed in the initial Governor’s Giant Vision Plan competition,” said Gov. Daugaard.  “Throughout the past few years, Eric’s business has experienced explosive growth, and it is clear that he exemplifies the entrepreneurial traits and skills that we want to encourage and nurture here in South Dakota.”

The Governor recognized the communities of De Smet and Sturgis as the small and large Community of the Year. “De Smet is looking to the future and working to recruit and encourage the next generation of economic development and city leaders,” Gov. Daugaard said. “In 2012, De Smet brought in three new companies, helped six other companies expand, launched its own marketing campaign and started the Young Guns organization, which brings together 20- to 40-year-olds living in the community to help with economic development.”

“Sturgis did a thorough evaluation to determine what it needed to become a year-round destination. They plan to create a downtown plaza and offer building setbacks to encourage year-round retail,” the Governor said. “In addition, Sturgis successfully applied to have its industrial park became one of South Dakota’s first Certified Ready Sites, and the community implemented a Career Tour Day to expose students to local industry employment.”

Every industry goes through periods of stability as well as important innovations that lead to growth and development. Healthcare record keeping is on the cusp of several exciting changes that will enable secure record sharing between physicians, health care centers, and patients. The ultimate goal is for a national infrastructure that includes standardized terminology and coding that will enable sharing of comprehensive patient records across multiple, distinct sites. Practically, this will put a patients’ complete record at a provider’s fingertips and allow for better care.

In preparation for change, the trend is that the current industry term EMR, which stands for Electronic Medical Records, will enter retirement and EHR or Electronic Health Records is taking its place. The benefits of this change are evident; healthcare practices and patient care are improved when providers have a comprehensive picture of their patients’ health histories and when patients have access to their records. It might sound TGTBT*****, but it’s around the corner and everyone at DocuTAP is excited to be a part of it.

However, until national structures are in place to enable large-scale interoperability, you can expect to see both EMR and EHR widely used to describe digital record keeping. Both systems digitize medical records and replace paper charts. We will continue to use both terms on our website. More importantly, we want you to know that you can use whichever term you want in reference to DocuTAP. We’ll never LOL******

*Too much information
** In our humble opinion
***Big deal
**** Information
***** Too good to be true.
******Laugh out loud

Every organization is moving—even those that are standing still. That’s because movement is always relative to something else. So if the current of your industry is moving strongly forward, and you aren’t, you’re losing ground. Even if you created the product everyone had to have last year, if you haven’t developed the next generation, you’ve fallen behind.

Once again, I’ll quote the provocative Seth Godin: “Like a rock in a flowing river, you might be standing still, but given the movement around you, collisions are inevitable. The irony for the person who prefers no movement is that there’s far less turbulence around the log floating down that same river. It’s moving, it’s changing, but compared to the river around it, it’s relatively calm.”

We learned the basic rules in physics class. We put them into practice in driver’s education. A body at rest tends to stay at rest. It takes a lot less energy to change lanes on the freeway than it does to parallel park.

In a world where significant advances can literally take place overnight, resting on yesterday’s accomplishments isn’t an option. A culture of motion, one that communicates a sense of movement and purposeful direction, fosters innovation. It’s understood that forward-looking ideas that maintain or accelerate that movement are welcome.

Are you moving? If so, how well are you conveying that sense of movement and direction to the members of your organization? Again, we’d love to hear your story.

Other people might spend hours doing their homework or consulting with experts and then commit to a sport by buying the best. They know that their gear has more features than they need today, but they’re already looking ahead to tomorrow.

The same can be said for EHR software.  There are a lot of products out there that work fine just out of the box.  They take little effort to implement and they’ll do the trick -for awhile. They are designed for the weekend warrior dipping their toe in the water. However, they cannot grow with your clinic as you expand your EHR needs.  These companies know they are selling you a base model and they are banking on the fact that you might want to dip your toe in the water.

DocuTAP has a different philosophy that offers the best of both worlds.  We offer a turnkey solution that you can use right away. DocuTAP comes out of the box especially for you, designed to meet your clinic’s needs. We make it our mission to help you and your staff quickly and efficiently manage patient visits from registration to payment management by providing unparalleled customer support.  What makes DocuTAP unique is that we also take a partnership approach that covers the entire product lifestyle.  During our initial interview with you and your staff we are already listening for how DocuTAP can meet your needs in the future. This means that when you’re ready to do more with your software, we are too. We are banking of the fact that your clinic is prime for growth and that you expect to reach great peaks with the equipment you have.

Many can’t get past that question. Even though they can see the possibilities, they can’t quite summon the courage to move beyond the comfortable performance of the current reality. And make no mistake—innovation requires risk.

More and more, we’re convinced that the future can’t be secured by playing it safe. As marketing guru Seth Godin says in his latest book, Poke the Box, “Please stop waiting for a map. We reward people who draw maps, not those who follow them.”

In the future in our industry, the rewards for those who consistently push themselves to step outside of the box will be great. Along those lines, here’s a little light reading to ponder.  I’m particularly fond of New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg who has taken it upon himself to bring innovation to municipal government by “making himself accountable” for the results.  That’s huge.  In order to truly create breakthrough technology and build spectacular business value, Healthcare IT leaders absolutely have to create innovative cultures that give their teams the freedom to fail – and most importantly to pick them up when they do.

The most difficult thing about writing is starting. That’s true for the novelist, the term-paper writer, and yes, the blogger. It’s relatively easy to come up with ideas. They’re always running through your head.  But at some point, you have to translate all that into coherent thought. You have to sit down.

You have to start.

Some of us—probably most of us—have had ideas that we wanted to put into action. Maybe they were good, workable ideas. Maybe they were awful. Perhaps they were great. We’ll never know, because we never gave it a shot. We failed to initiate.

As Seth Godin states in his most recent book, Poke the Box, “The simple thing that separates individuals from those who languish is the very thing that separates exciting and growing organizations from those that stagnate and die. The winners have turned initiation into a passion and a practice.”

Creating a climate of innovation first requires the granting of permission to initiate. That does inject more risk into the business environment, and heightens the possibility of failure. But it also releases the runners and set the table for some spectacular success.

Does your clinic or technology organization encourage initiation, the necessary precursor to innovation? If so, how? We’d love to hear your stories. Email them to me at Kelby@docuTAP.com.  We’ll pick our favorites and share your stories with our audience – protecting the innocent by removing names!

Granted, sometimes that great innovation was conceived as a consequence of turning the process completely on its head. But every discovery begins with a situation, a problem, a need. And I would contend there is always a process that leads to the breakthrough.

I’ve talked – with some outside of DocuTAP – about the fact that we have realized the need for an honest assessment of our organizational position on innovation.  We basically stopped in our tracks, engaged our innovation process, and thoroughly evaluated everything—including the process itself.

The result, we believe, was a greater mission clarity and a different kind of breakthrough—a business model innovation.  Stay tuned.

Glenn Harnett, CMO at American Family Care, states, “I have years of experience using many different EMR systems. I was tasked earlier this year to choose a new EMR and PM system for our 34-site urgent care company. After an exhaustive search with literally over 25 demos and several on-site visits we chose DocuTAP. It’s the easiest urgent care system on the market for physicians to learn. I can get a new doc up and running in one morning with seamless charting and auto coding. I have over 100 docs on the system, and acceptance has been robust and universal. Nobody would go back to our old EMR. We implemented the system in our final 20 clinics in seven weeks!”

Early in the year, DocuTAP gained the attention of Bluff Point Associates, a private equity firm based in Westport, Conn. “DocuTAP has built a distinctive platform designed specifically for the urgent care setting, improving the overall patient and physician experiences," said Kevin Fahey, Managing Director at Bluff Point Associates.

With the addition of 176 new clinics on the DocuTAP software, 60 new full-time employees and more than doubling their physical office space in Sioux Falls, S.D., 2012 has truly been a pivotal year, and DocuTAP is positioned for continued growth in 2013 and beyond. “Whether we are adding to our team in Sioux Falls or implementing new sites, DocuTAP has stayed true to our mission of being the innovator and thought leader in the urgent care space,” said Eric McDonald, CEO of DocuTAP. “Our success and growth this year is a direct result of the work that we have diligently put into creating a top-notch solution for the urgent care industry.”

DocuTAP also experienced exponential growth with its integrated Revenue Cycle Services offering. Now servicing more than 40 clinics, the DocuTAP RCS team is excited to specialize in one of the fastest growing healthcare segments in the country. As urgent care best practices continue to mature, dependence on generic EMRs and manual processes proves costly. In contrast, DocuTAP provides an easy-to-use and reliable platform that is fast becoming the standard urgent care owners rely on daily. It eliminates hard costs and improves on the number of patients that can be seen by integrating customized templates and automating valuable analytics.

For more information on DocuTAP please visit us online at www.DocuTAP.com or call us at 1-877-697-4696

About DocuTAP

DocuTAP began in May of 2000 in Sioux Falls, SD. Since its inception, the company has seen impressive growth and serves a national customer base. DocuTAP's innovative workflow solution leads the industry in its level of integration and in its user-friendly, intuitive design that functions the way physicians think and practice. DocuTAP partners with customers to provide integrated EMR and Practice Management software, hardware, implementation and support in one powerfully simple turn-key solution. With unique, easy to use technology designed for urgent care, clinics can complete an entire patient visit from online check-in through billing in less time than ever. DocuTAP takes a partnership approach over the entire product lifecycle to ensure customer success. More information about DocuTAP and the other services they provide can be found at www.docutap.com.

Due to the success of last year’s food drive, we were determined to make this year’s season of giving even bigger. We decided to collect new, unwrapped toys for the Sioux Falls Toys for Tots program, which provides age-appropriate gifts for needy children in the local community. With a staff that has almost tripled in size since this time last year, our Toys for Tots project was a smashing success. Our donation totaled 254 toys, averaging almost three toys donated per employee.During the 2011 Christmas season, we were inspired to feed those who are hungry. The Sioux Falls Food Pantry’s shelves were nearly empty, and we were determined to help. According to Feeding South Dakota, five pounds of food provides up to four meals for the hungry, and with this in mind we set a goal of collecting 175 pounds of food. Contributions were collected on-site, and we nearly tripled our original goal, ultimately donating 476 pounds of nonperishable goods. That’s almost 380 meals!

In addition to the Toys for Tots program, many of us also contributed to the Holiday Clearing House. Hosted by The Community Outreach and Center of Hope, the Holiday Clearing House matches struggling families with sponsors based on each family’s unique needs. This holiday season, we “adopted” two Sioux Falls area families with the desire to provide the basic and necessary items these families cannot afford for themselves. We raised funds and delivered what many of us take for granted — food, personal hygiene items, blankets, pillows, winter clothing, and Christmas gifts.

Outside of annual, company-wide donation drives during the holiday season, many of us volunteer our time, resources, and skills year-round. We coach Little League, teach Sunday school, serve on various community boards and committees, and everything in-between. We believe service to others is not restricted to a certain time of year, and the all of us at DocuTAP will continue to support the community through our individual and collective acts of service.