46. Coreplus

Revenue: $1.46 million
Growth: 115.01%
Founders: John (Yianni) Serpanos, 43, Mark James Pirotta and Tony Pirotta
Head office: Victoria
Year founded: 2009
Employees: 15
Industry: Healthcare
Website: coreplus.com.au

The team at Coreplus experienced early on an interesting example of the type of tactic competitors are willing to use against a disruptive company.

Securing capital and investors for its medical software-as-a-service (SaaS) product proved difficult in the company’s early days, especially as many investors were still unsure as to exactly how the SaaS model worked and whether it was suitable for the industry.

But Coreplus had evoked enough interest in its offering to experience what could only be described as a sneaky piece of corporate espionage.

One of the founders of Coreplus, John Serpanos, says it pays to keep a watch on what some prospective ‘investors’ might be up to.

“We also discovered that some incumbents threatened by our business model dressed themselves as prospective investors in order to discover as much as they could about our business model and strategies,” Serpanos says.

“Having identified this early on, we focused on team-building and in turn business-building by recruiting people who were passionate about our possibility and willing to invest into the business with their time/ effort.”

Serpanos says his company sets out to improve conformance and communication between the different software and systems being used across the Australian primary and allied health services.

“The pre-existing problem technically was obtaining secure message delivery (SMD) meant each health provider had to sign up and install multiple software products and pay each vendor their respective fees but could not send or receive across different networks,” Serpanos says.

This problem was a little like the customers of a mobile phone carrier service being able to only call other users on that network and no one else.

“Our digital innovation has meant that in secure message delivery (SMD) terms, health providers can now have one simple SMD connection via Coreplus and be able to send/receive SMD from multiple SMD vendor end points e.g. GPs, specialists, hospitals, etc.”

Much of the impetus for the software came about from the experiences of one of the other founders of the company, psychologist Tony Pirotta.

“One of our shareholders and co-founders is a practising psychologist whose caseload required him to work from multiple locations. Each location meant that he would have to physically transport patient records/files as there was not a cost-effective system that he could use that would support electronic patient records across multiple locations,” Serpanos says.

“Our first problem to solve was simply to offer an anywhere, anytime access to patient records/clinical notes, particularly in the mental health sector where health professionals were working from multiple locations.”

Serpanos says once some of Pirotta’s colleagues saw the benefits of the software, the ball started rolling for the company.

Since then, the company has worked to refine and expand upon its key software.

“Our product has continued to remain leading edge from an innovation standpoint having enabled tele-health and other anywhere, any-time healthcare delivery models where health providers are required to work from multiple locations,” he says.

Serpanos says the industry has started to realise the benefits of the product provided by Coreplus and the focus is on developing partnerships.

“Right now we are focused on achieving a number of goals in market size and connecting, helping and growing our user communities health practices,” he says.