MedHub goes from U-M project to money-making, job-creating business

The creators of MedHub didn’t foresee that it would become the money-making enterprise it is today when they started it at the University of Michigan in 2002. Within one year, however, their project evolved into a business with a will of its own.

“We just started adding more functionality to the system and it became extremely commercially viable,” says Peter Orr, president of MedHub.

The system is a web-enabled enterprise residency management solution developed to improve communication, collaboration, and residency information management. But Orr describes it more succinctly as a system that tracks what medical school students do during their residencies.

“We track everything a medical resident does when training to become a doctor,” Orr says. “We document every breath they take.”

It may seem a tab bit Big Brother-ish on the surface but it’s a system that tracks and processes vast amounts of information so hospitals can receive millions in Medicare reimbursements for patient care. MedHub is responsible for $85 million at U-M Hospital alone.

There are about 5,000 users at U-M and many more at large teaching hospitals across the nation, such as Stanford. MedHub has been steadily growing at these types of hospitals where it has experienced about 60 percent growth annually since starting. That enough growth that the four-person firm is looking for a couple of more employees to accommodate it.

Source: Peter Orr, president of MedHub
Writer: Jon Zemke