Prize-winning firm has setback

WILKES-BARRE – A promising medical information technology company that won an entrepreneurship prize in 2006 has suspended operations as its founder seeks additional investment capital.

Unified Medical Informatics founder Dr. Sanjay Udoshi, of Harveys Lake, reached in Illinois on his cell phone, said he had not been able to obtain sufficient backing to continue development and marketing of the company’s electronic medical records computer program.

“The investment environment was unfavorable over the last few months,” Udoshi said. “We’ve had to step back from our original operating plan.”

He said all seven employees had been laid off in the fall. The company also has been unable to make payments on a $50,000 county loan and rental of its space in the Innovation Center @ Wilkes-Barre.

Udoshi said he had actively sought local investors last summer without success. He is now expanding the search beyond Pennsylvania and even overseas. A $200,000 state grant was announced in September, but the actual cash has yet to arrive.

“We need bridge funding in the range of $250,000,” to be viable, Udoshi said. In all he estimates the capital need at just under $2 million.

The company planned to take advantage of a state and federal government push toward storing and sharing medical information on computers. But Gov. Ed Rendell’s ambitious health care plan has stalled and a Bush administration goal to have all medical records maintained electronically has languished at the end of his term.

In addition to seeking funds, Udoshi has worked to educate state officials about the advantages of making it easy to share patient information.

State Rep. Eddie Day Pashinski, D-Wilkes-Barre, said he has tried to help and will continue to do so.

“I arranged meetings with qualified people here in Harrisburg,” Pashinski said Monday, in which Udoshi made presentations on the value of electronic record keeping.

Pashinski said technology experts who reviewed Udoshi’s idea felt it was workable.

“He might have been a little too ahead of his time,” Pashinski said, in that there is no mandate in Pennsylvania for health care providers to keep and exchange information electronically.

Unified Medical Informatics won the Regional Entrepreneur of the Year award sponsored by the Northeastern Pennsylvania Alliance in 2006, and supporters still believe in its concept and business plan.

“You spend five minutes with him and you fall in love with the idea,” said Todd Vonderheid, chief executive of the Greater Wilkes-Barre Chamber of Business and Industry, which owns the Innovation Center.