Finalist: Privately Held Company of the Year:
Plexis Healthcare Systems

By Sean Meyers
Special Reporter to The Business Journal

Anyone who wonders whether the Portland area is big enough to attract talented technology employees should consider the case of Plexis Healthcare Systems.

Already one of the fastest-growing technology companies in the state, Plexis is on a 48 percent growth pace in 2004 even though it operates in the competitive healthcare software industry and despite its remote Ashland location.

"Ashland is a very desirable location and we don’t have to hire hundreds and hundreds of programmers," says Plexis CEO Jorge Yant, who started the business eight years ago in a garage with Chief Technology Officer Terry Dorries. He came to Ashland from Los Angeles after an extensive search for a new home.

“This is the best place to live in the country. We have a close-knit team and family atmosphere, and it shows in all we do.” Annual income for the company increased from $2.44 million in 2001 to $5.08 million in 2003, a gain of 108 percent.

The company has devoured market share by making it easy for health insurance companies to make online transactions, which cuts down on paperwork and helps reduce duplicate payments and other costly errors.

But its services also help doctors and patients in myriad ways. In some cases a physician can now have a payment from a health care provider transferred into a personal account before the patient even leaves the office. On slower transactions, patients or doctors can access the electronic record to find out how far along the claim has proceeded.

“ A person can go to any bank or ATM in the world, swipe a credit or debit card and get cash instantly, but 42 days later a doctor can’t get a claim paid, and it’s really just another financial transaction,“ says Yant.

New software also enables patients to sit down at a computer and practice the next big thing, “self-directed healthcare.” Patients can design their own health plan online, deciding when to raise and lower deductions, and many other options.

Next year the company will fully deploy the newest generation of its benefits management software. Quantum Choice will offer health plan administrators 1,000 additional features.

“Until now, teams of programmers had to modify source code or redesign forms for every health plan,” says Yant. “Plexis Quantum Choice is designed to let health plan managers create specialized plans using rules rather than application programming logic. This new capability provides significant savings in getting g new plans to market and requiring minimal IT services.

Plexis has about 75 customers in the United States and abroad, including Canada, the Bahamas and Malaysia. The program starts at $100,000 and can cost several million. Today, the company has 60 employees in Ashland, three in Chicago and 30 working temporarily in India. Plexis acquired Logical Claims Solutions earlier this year.

When asked if the company will go public, Yant had thought that sales would cool off this fall, but some big orders came in late. “We’re having a really big fourth quarter.”