CareCloud announced the appointment of R. Scott Lentz as Chief Financial Officer. What does this mean for CareCloud and for the rest of the EHR industry?
Scott has a history of working with Healthcare IT companies – Aprima, and PracticeOne – among others. So, what is common among those companies?
Chop! Chop! Chop!
I see him as a Chop Financial Officer. He’s been great for the company shareholders and investors, but bad news for customers. I’m sure some may not like this bold statement.
- Look at what happened with Aprima. Product sold to Allscripts. Allscripts botched it up because the entire financial model did not work out, and decided to kill the product.
- PracticeOne – is now AdvancedMD, which was sold to ADP. Clients of PracticeOne complain they lost the support they used to get.
Two things are clear to me.
- The EHR Industry is financially overrated, over overvalued. Yet, investors keep plowing money into companies like CareCloud and Practice Fusion. I’ve written many times on my blogs, that there is just not enough return on investment from organic sales. Everyone is banking on sales of ‘big data’ or being acquired.
- When someone starts pumping too much money into an EHR company, and hires a high-powered CFO, I run away from it. What you need as a provider, is a company that believes in providing great products and services rather than doing financial engineering. I don’t see high profile announcements – ‘we hired a CCO – Chief Client Officer’, that will focus on providing the best product and services to our clients.
If I am considering buying an EHR, I’d be skeptical of CareCloud. If I am a client of CareCloud already, I would watch very closely and have a Plan B in place, just in case.
