There were three minor glitches since the service started, she noted, and “they are usually on the problem even before you call.”

Marco Smit, president of Health 2.0 Advisors, a California-based market intelligence firm that provides strategic guidance to healthcare companies, says that while CareCloud has rivals, most of the competitors offer systems developed years ago. Competitors include Epic, Allscripts, Dell EMR (for electronic medical records) and Athenahealth (also a cloud-based system), but the market is highly fragmented and no single company holds a large share.

“Doctors say they can’t change their whole workload or life to learn how a new system works,” Smit said. “The benefit of CareCloud is that they make the technology fit the life of the practitioner. From the practice management point of view — this is physician centric. CareCloud can be installed and people trained more quickly.”

Doctors spend a lot of time keeping track of their work, Smit noted, and most are not good at handling red tape. A cardiologist, for example, may spend one day at one office, two at another and two more at a third. CareCloud makes it easier for the practitioner to keep track of office time, patients, procedures and other items.

CareCloud also offers opportunities to benchmark a practice to see how it stacks up against others, Smit said. For example, if a specialist has too many hospital admissions for patients compared to other doctors in the same specialty, the system raises a red flag. Perhaps patients are not being correctly taught about post-hospital medications and follow-ups. “The system doesn’t tell you what to do but it does provide intelligent feedback.”

And as the physician data base grows, Smit said, vast amounts of data will be accumulated and the company will be able to provide data-driven advice on how to improve each medical practice on a national scale.

But with about 900,000 physicians in the United States, CareCloud must continue to grow quickly. “Scale is the No. 1 challenge,” Smit noted. “If you’re big enough, you become the standard and other competing systems will have to match up.”

In 2010, CareCloud was picked to be the co-winner of IBM’s SmartCamp Silicon Valley, a program sponsored by IBM to identify and bring together outstanding entrepreneurs, investors and experienced mentors. Winners have the opportunity to meet with international investors and a range of experts who can help their companies grow.

Santalo, who grew up in Miami and earned degrees from both the University of Miami and Florida International University, said he believes that companies like CareCloud, working with local universities and medical research centers, can develop a South Florida base for software innovation in healthcare. While Silicon Valley develops core technologies, applications can be developed here and in other parts of the world.

“South Florida is very attractive for new companies” said Susan Amat, executive director of The Launch Pad, UM’s entrepreneurship career center, and a lecturer in the Department of Management. “In a few years, CareCloud will have a data base at the national level that others will want,” she added. And developers will be able to find new apps based on this.

“I believe South Florida has great potential for development —– especially in life sciences, biotech and clean energy,” said Amir Mirmiran, professor and dean at FIU’s College of Engineering and Computer Science. Central to this is creating an “ecosystem” of support from education, business and government, he noted, a system that provides support to companies like CareCloud.

“We have an opportunity to change the world,” Santalo said. “I think healthcare is where all the opportunities are. Someone is going to fix this. I hope it’s us.”