However, the three went from dream jobs to living the American dream when they founded OnceLogix nine years ago in Winston-Salem, N.C. OnceLogix is a software company that develops in-house solutions for different industries. Their flagship product is ShareNote.com.
Brown remarks, “I’m responsible for the development [and] the implementation of different processes that cross all responsibilities within the company — sales, marketing, training and even on software development.”
“[Companies] use our system to manage their entire system, and that is training, billing, documentation, scheduling, policing their employees that provide mental health care in the community, [and] fraud prevention, [which] helps them maintain all of their requirements that the governing bodies require of them to ensure that they have successful audits,” said Brown. The company operates in eight states, from Florida to North Carolina to Louisiana. “Without our system, these 240 institutions would be in a state of disarray, every day.”
OnceLogix is one of the leading EHR, electronic health records, companies overall, but it is to their advantage that they are black-owned and black run. Brown says, “There are a couple of others, but they are basically start-ups. And that’s a huge advantage because our clients can really relate to us because behavioral health care is dominated by African Americans because typically by nature we are caretakers and they can relate to us when we go in and pinpoint the ills of their business and then provide solutions.”
“No other behavioral health care software company can say they have 240 agencies. That’s over 15,000 people using our system every single day with 90 million progress notes that’s in our system that’s being managed and protected by us every single day.”
Brown admitted that they trio didn’t choose the behavioral health care field, per se, but that it found them.
“My partner Trinity, has been doing websites for a while. And he created a website for a woman who owned a group home for troubled youth. She was complaining about her documentation and things like that. So he created an access database program which is a skeleton of what ShareNote.com is today,” he said. “She liked it, showed a couple of friends, and made a couple of suggestions. And then he and I got together, and we felt that we had a product that we could take to the market and that’s what we did. We brought Ty into the mix and we all quit our corporate jobs.”
“There are other providers of electronic health records systems that exist that health care companies can use,” says Brown.
“OnceLogix is unique because of the company’s following attributes:
No. 1. Electronic health care records systems are typically created for the medical field. We went after a niche market and created ours specifically [with the] behavioral health care industry in mind.
No 2. Our costs are really, really low. Very few people can compete with us when it comes to price. We bring a great value for the price relative to the services that we deliver.
No 3. From an innovative standpoint, we are just more clever than other people. We listen to our clients more than anyone else. We come up with innovative products, or aspects of our products that other EHRs haven’t thought about.”
Though the trio were glad they were able to “retire” from their corporate jobs while still in their twenties, Brown said that working in corporate America helped him develop a billing philosophy that enabled OnceLogix to separate itself from the pack.
“Absolutely. I give you one key example; and it’s how we decided to price our system versus what the industry was doing. In the financial services business, you have two types of brokerage: you have a transactional broker and that person is actually trying to sell a product and get a commission; but then you have a fee-based broker and that person is trying to gather assets and charge a fee on a regular basis. With fee-based, it takes longer because the fees aren’t that much and it takes longer to build a revenue stream, but once you build that revenue stream, it’s continuous and residual and it just happens. So you can just walk in on January 1 and know how much revenue that you are going to bring in. So I applied that model to what we were doing.
Other businesses they were selling their software, putting it on desktops, putting them on at a companies’ business. We basically charge licensing fees. So we charge people a fee to use our system every month, over and over again. So our job is to not lose any, and to add onto that.”
Now that the founders of OnceLogix are living the quintessential American dream, they want to take that dream to the next level. “We want to spread up and down the Eastern Seaboard. We want to continue to innovate and expand our product offerings. Right now, behavioral health care is the flagship product, but we have so much more that we can offer.”
Stay tuned.
