Company History

HealthCare IT, Inc. delivers biomedical research software, healthcare managed hosting services and professional services to the biomedical and clinical research and health care sectors. Historically, the company manufactured commercial software that is used by research institutes and hospitals to manage biospecimens collected from patients in healthcare settings.  The company (originally under the Ardais and GulfStream Bioinformatics names) has a decade of experience designing, developing, and selling this commercial healthcare informatics software. Our widely used, state-of-the-art biospecimen management system is capable of tracking high quality, richly annotated physical samples during every aspect of the biospecimen supply chain, including the shipping and receiving of specimens and specimen derivatives prepared for high volume molecular level laboratory analysis. The software, known as BIGR® (Biomaterials and Information for Genomics Research), had users from over 250 distinct organizations including more than 40 medical centers and 15 global pharmaceutical companies during its design phase and when it was used as an Ardais repository management system.

In the spring of 2008, a decision was made to expand the company by offering two new services: a healthcare managed hosting service and a professional information technology consulting service. Both of these new services were a natural outgrowth of hosting our software and providing custom integration, biobanking consultation, and help desk services to our BIGR® customers.  

In the spring of 2008, the Board of Directors brought in a new executive team who had extensive backgrounds in the government IT healthcare service sector and healthcare informatics. As the new management was put in place, additional capital investments were made and the company was renamed to HealthCare IT, Inc. to better reflect its future directions. Today, the core of the company still contains a culture devoted to the level of software design and implementation rigor required for a healthcare software company to succeed in the commercial marketplace. Around this core exists a rapidly expanding set of professional and managed hosting services that we offer to our customers by themselves and in custom bundles.

The mission of the company is to provide critical information technology solutions at the intersection of biomedical science and medicine. This mission is guided by our belief that the disease treatments of tomorrow will be based on accurate disease diagnosis followed by targeted molecular therapies at the level of individuals or groups. Achieving such a goal requires the fields of science and medicine to exchange information in ways that enable the rapid translation of discoveries into therapies. In recognition of this, the company’s leadership and staff are active participants in the national dialog and programs that are defining the next generation of biomedical, clinical trials and comparative effectiveness research. Information technology does and will continue to play a critical role in making each of these research areas successful. The staff and leadership of HealthCare IT, Inc. are well prepared to provide innovative software, systems, and support to the healthcare community as the use of information technology in the sector continues to increase.

Today, HealthCare IT, Inc. operates from offices in Lexington Massachusetts and Rockville, Maryland.  Our commercial software development activities are predominantly in the Lexington facilities whereas our government contracting infrastructure and healthcare managed hosting facilities are in Rockville.  The Rockville hosting facility offers state-of-the-art hosting services specialized for support of health care systems that have specialized requirements associated with handling privacy protected or other sensitive healthcare related data. The facility features a raised floor, large UPS, and humidity and temperature conditioned space.  It is protected by a fire suppression system activated by a sensor array and physical security suitable for storage and handling of electronic Personal Health Information.  This facility also provides the server infrastructure required for us to deliver caBIG® applications as a service as part of our NCI Support Service Provider agreement to the national biomedical IT community. We ensure that the appropriate safeguards and security are always in place to meet any HIPAA related compliance requirements.

We have developed, configured, rapidly deployed and tested application bundles and solutions in this facility for our customers.  To help customers evaluate the robustness and scalability of their application software and systems, we have developed a sophisticated testing harness and infrastructure that can simulate production usage of systems.  Moreover, we make wide use of server virtualization technology.   By designing, building, and testing application bundles and deploying using server virtualization technology, we are able to rapidly deploy reliable software within a secure infrastructure and with predictable performance characteristics.   

The entire senior management team of HealthCare IT, Inc. is familiar with goals and objectives of key national programs in healthcare and medical science and is eager to support initiatives that increase the overall capability of the clinical research and healthcare community. Our senior management team has over 60 years of combined experience in providing healthcare IT services. Perhaps more importantly, we have worked with many organizations and communities undergoing a technology adoption cycle with its attendant challenges and impacts.  HealthCare IT, Inc. is focused on the place where science meets technology and medicine.