Park Place Boosts Rev With Healthcare Sales

Healthcare continues to be a high growth area of the U.S. economy; the U.S. Department of Labor predicted that the industry will add nearly 3.5 million new jobs between 2002 and 2012, an increase of 30 percent. As hospitals and home health care businesses expand, merge and consolidate, a robust opportunity is emerging for solution providers with solid service and integration reputations. Over the past four years, the healthcare space has delivered excellent profitability to Park Place International (VARBusiness 500 No. 464). The company reported 2006 revenue of $29 million, up from 20.8 million in 2005. Park Place International attributes 80 percent of its revenue to the healthcare sector. Ed Kenty, Park Place International president and CEO, spoke recently with Senior Editor Jennifer Bosavage on the importance of customer satisfaction and how he differentiates his company from the competition.

What do the next 12 months look like for Park Place International?

Ed Kenty: We expect to continue our current growth. Park Place International is primarily a service business, focused on providing the Meditech application to our customers. It's like an ERP application for that industry; it's software that makes patient care more efficient. Our growth from providing those solutions has quadrupled in the last four years. Much of that is due to our strong commitment to customer service and to the fact we have a very loyal customer base. We also work with many different vendors: IBM, HP, Dell, EMC, for example, and the product fits well with that hardware. We migrate some hospitals to Meditech, but for many of our customers, we refresh existing applications.

It's been a wild ride. We've had to make a lot of changes to grow our profitability and to meet customers' service expectations. We've done that primarily by hiring more high quality engineers.

What made you get into the Meditech integration business?

Kenty: We got into this market about four years ago at our customers' request. They urged us to get into the marketplace because there wasn't enough competition, and they had a good relationship with us as a service provider. We developed a service relationship with them over time. We've been in the business 16 years, and a few of our customers we've had since the beginning. Our average customer has been with us eight or nine years.

What differentiates you from the competition?

Kenty: There are not a lot of competitors that do this work, so our customer service is important.

It's all complex work. We do everything from configuration to integration to implementation. Before installing the solution, we take it to our factory, test it, burn it, make sure it's running properly -- then we disassemble it and reassemble it. At that point, we should just need to 'snap' it altogether, because we've done the testing, etc. already at the factory. After that testing, we are in and out of the customer's facility quickly, often in two days. We are not hanging around the customer site for a couple of weeks like some competitors who don't have our configuration capacity. That's a strong differentiator, because being onsite for a long time can be very disruptive.

How have regulations such as HIPAA effected Park Place's business?

Kenty: All compliance issues are handled through the software; everything is built in. So it's a sales opportunity for us to be able to provide that type of product.

However, part of HIPAA is disaster recovery. We can provide customers with a fully redundant site for backup. For example, in this industry we are seeing a lot of consolidation " hospitals merging together that want to consolidate their information into one large data center. We can set up one data center at one location and a redundancy at the other. We provide the hardware, the software and the maintenance: full lifecycle management.