Eyemaginations: healthcare software company moves to Fells Point [PHOTOS]

Eyemaginations is just settling in. About two weeks ago the software company moved its nearly 30 full-time employees from a Towson office to a new location on Lancaster Street in Fells Point.

“The city is much more exciting,” says Smitha Gopal, who worked for the company for more than seven years before taking over as CEO last November. The  3,400-square-foot office is inside the Union Box Company building.
Founded in 1999, the company creates visual software for healthcare professionals like physicians, hospitals, and smaller practices. Its media comes in the form of videos and anatomical images displayable on the iPad. Doctors can draw on the screen to exactly identify the scope of their procedures, and the videos — fully narrated — are accessible to patients inside and outside of the hospital.
The goal? To cut through doctors’ jargon so medical procedures are discernible to people without years of medical school under their belts.
Eyemaginations was founded by a practicing optometrist, Gopal said. (Hence the name.) Over time the company has expanded its software options, and now offers its media for ear, nose and throat doctors and, as of this year, cardiologists. Around 2,200 physicians’ practices and hospitals, mainly in the U.S., now use Eyemaginations’ software, said Gopal.

Gopal said the company doesn’t “disclose financials,” but that Eyemaginations now makes between $5 million and $10 million in revenue annually.
As of last May, Eyemaginations’ visual software is wholly cloud-based via its new platform, ECHO, which works on tablets, desktop computers and mobile phones.
“Now patients don’t have to worry about software — they just click a link,” said Jake Whittington, a system administrator and software engineer at Eyemaginations for a little more than two years.
“In healthcare, lots of hospitals don’t have robust IT [departments],” he said. “The cloud allows them to have a system they don’t need to maintain. If we have to push out an update, they don’t have to do anything.”

The same goes for doctors’ practices, and that’s the advantage of ECHO, according to Eyemaginations: having a cloud-based platform built on Amazon Web Services means doctors and patients need not download large media files that take up gigabytes of space.
As for the company’s physical move, Gopal hopes it’ll serve as an example for other startups thinking about setting up in Baltimore city.
“We want to see more thriving businesses come out of downtown,” she said.