CareCloud wants to help doctors spend more time practicing medicine and less time managing their practices.

Started in 2009, the Miami-based privately-held company has developed a comprehensive Internet-based system that reduces paperwork, streamlines medical practices and improves efficiency in the growing healthcare sector.

CareCloud offers a menu of online services that schedule appointments, manage patients, process insurance claims and billings, handle collections, produce analyses of office finances and operations, update electronic medical records and provide a link between patients, doctors, diagnostic centers and other healthcare organizations.

“We take care of all the heavy lifting for physicians,” said Albert Santalo, 44, CareCloud’s founder, president and CEO. “The idea is that doctors can practice medicine and focus on patients, and not have to worry about all the details related to their practices.”

As the economic downturn drags on, CareCloud is part of the newest wave of fast-growing technology companies that are gaining notice as job creators. Just in the past five months, CareCloud has hired 30 more people and attracted $20 million in new venture capital. In December, Santalo participated in a meeting at the White House of Startup America, a presidential program designed to promote entrepreneurship.

The stakes are huge. Santalo, who has worked for many years in information technology and financial services and previously founded Avisena, a company that developed revenue management software for the healthcare sector, believes that the comprehensive, client-based products and services he and his CareCloud team have developed can help revolutionize the country’s inefficient medical system.

Realizing that much of the enormous waste in healthcare was due to administrative inefficiency and excessive paperwork, Santalo decided to build a company that would offer new technological solutions to replace older software and service systems, often developed in the 1990s before email became popular, and still used in most medical offices. He designed the basic concepts and began seeking private capital in early 2009.

“I originally was looking for $2 million and ended up with about $3 million,” Santalo said. The following year he obtained another $5 million in private investment and in September 2011 raised $20.1 million from two Silicon Valley-based investors — Intel Capital and Norwest Venture Partners.

As he obtained fresh capital, Santalo expanded his staff of computer engineers, experts in computer science and other professionals, developed the proprietary software for CareCloud’s basic services and went to work on a variety of new applications.

Technology used by most healthcare providers “tends to lag behind the general tech industry,” Santalo said. “We believe a big part of what we have to do is continue innovating. To do this, we will increase our geographic footprint and expand our sales and marketing teams. Most doctors’ offices are mom and pop operations and aren’t linked together,” he added. “The cloud gives us a way to connect everyone.”

CareCloud’s basic service covers all administrative and financial aspects of medical practices, and costs $499 per month per physician. It also offers a more comprehensive revenue cycle management service, called Concierge, with fees based on a percentage of collections. All customers will receive free access to a private social network that links doctors, patients and other people and institutions in the healthcare sector.

The company is also rolling out an electronic health records system, and CareCloud will be available on mobile devices in the coming months.

Services are entirely Web-based and are downloaded directly to the customer’s system, with the help of CareCloud representatives who ensure that the new software is suited to the office’s needs and fully functional. Clients require a computer, Internet access (the faster the better) and an up-to-date Web browser. They do not need to buy new equipment and CareCloud can work with most desktops, PCs, Macs, notebooks or tablets.

The company says that an office usually goes “live” with CareCloud between 30 and 60 days after signing a contract. CareCloud software and applications were designed specifically for easy use by doctors, nurses and office administrators, not for use by tech experts. The company uses Miami-based Terremark for its cloud-computing infrastructure and other services.

Today, CareCloud, with 110 employees, has more than 200 clients, representing about 1,000 physicians. Sixty-four percent of CareCloud’s customers are based in Florida and the rest are in 19 other states.

Finding new employees in high tech for his company in South Florida is not a problem, Santalo said. “We don’t have to compete with Google or Facebook for people in Silicon Valley. We have a high-tech environment here and we live in paradise.”

Santalo declined to release specific revenue figures, but said that revenue last year was expected to grow by about 600 percent over 2010 while revenue this year is projected to increase by 200 to 300 percent. The company is not yet profitable, the CEO said. CareCloud’s goal is to generate more capital and continue growing.

One Miami medical practice has been using CareCloud since May 2010 and is pleased with the results.

“We have CareCloud’s Concierge option, which covers everything,” said Madelyn Pardinas, practice administrator at Nephrology Associates of South Florida P.A., which has six physicians, 11 employees and about 2,000 active patients.

“The system is beautiful  . .  it’s incredibly easy to operate and very user friendly,” she added. “The system does everything for us — office operations, insurance, collections, monthly statements to patients — everything except posting patients’ charges after each visit. It allows the practice to be so efficient and makes everything easy. I can see everything on a dashboard — it’s a snapshot of the practice.”

When patients check in, the system shows insurance eligibility, past charges, whether they have paid, etc. When doctors enter an exam room, the patient’s medical history and medications appear on the computer screen. Physicians at this office prefer to speak to patients and take notes on paper, later transcribing information to their computers, rather than working directly on computers during the office visit.

Installing the new system “was fairly painless,” Pardinas said, and only took a few days. CareCloud sent an implementation team to the nephrology offices for training and trouble shooting a few days before and after the system went “live,” she said. “Customer service bends over backwards for us. They know exactly who I am and if there is a glitch, I can speak with someone directly or chat through the system.”

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.”