This CloudMine-Jefferson collabo will give you faith in Philly’s health IT aspirations

On February 7, 2013, two months after CloudMine announced it would focus on enterprise customers, CEO Brendan McCorkle shared some tips about working with corporations, during a panel hosted by PACT and Philly Startup Leaders.
Find a champion, he said.
Three years later, as the company doubles down on enterprise customers in the healthcare space, he’s found a champion in Neil Gomes, Jefferson’s head of innovation and customer experience.
It’s an example of how CloudMine has taken advantage of Philadelphia’s strong healthcare sector — and how the industry has also shaped CloudMine.

As small and flat as technology has made our world, in-person conversations are just better.

Gomes, whom we introduced you to via his team’s work to build an Airbnb-like staffing app for Pope weekend, has spoken at two conferences about Jefferson’s work with CloudMine: Gartner’s Application Architecture, Development & Integration Conference in Las Vegas last November and more recently at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Conference, also in Vegas.
Gomes has a been a vocal supporter, McCorkle said, and “that’s a powerful thing.”
Jefferson uses CloudMine to develop web and mobile apps, including an Apple ResearchKit app that collects data for a prostate cancer study run by oncologist Dr. Adam Dicker. Hackers at Jefferson’s hackathon last fall also got to use CloudMine, hearkening back to CloudMine’s early days as a hackathon tool. (While some CloudMine staff engaged with Jefferson on the hackathon side, CloudMine’s sales staff also worked to close the deal. “That’s how it is with big companies,” McCorkle said. “You gotta go after them from a couple different sides.”)
There was a lot to like about CloudMine, Gomes said: “They were extremely responsive, they were local, they took part in our hackathon.” Plus, they’re HIPAA-compliant.
Jefferson has also helped shape CloudMine’s product offerings, McCorkle said. They’re one of the customers that drove CloudMine to launch its new Connected Health Cloud product.

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In the last five years, CloudMine has worked to figure out its target market.

Initially, they sold to individuals. Then they turned to enterprise. Now they’re narrowing that focus to healthcare. It’s the company “doubling down on what works best,” McCorkle said.

In retrospect, he said, healthcare has worked best in part because CloudMine has “the easiest access” to those customers, thanks to Philadelphia’s healthcare industry and its proximity to the other Northeast healthcare hubs like Northern New Jersey and Boston. It helps that CloudMine gets to “play the local card,” he said.

CloudMine can have coffee with, say, Pfizer and doesn’t have to hop on a plane to do so.

“As small and flat as technology has made our world, in-person conversations are just better,” he said.

Sounds like McCorkle could be a pretty good spokesman for the Health Care Innovation Collaborative.