By Jeremy Peppas
Stephens Media
LITTLE ROCK — A rural Lonoke County farming town seems an unlikely place to start an information technology firm.
But Carlisle, population 2,304, is home base for Unityware, the home-based brainchild of founder Brian Stack and the first business in residence for the Arkansas Small Business and Technology Development Center at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
The company provides software solutions for medical operations.
“The Carlisle office is actually Brian’s home,” Don Pennington, the firm’s director of sales and marketing, said with a laugh at a recent open house held to show off Unityware’s digs in the Reynolds Center at UALR. The firm’s computer servers will stay in Lonoke County but the rest of the business will be in Little Rock.
Stack got the patents for the software concept in 2000. The business began in earnest when he and his wife, Cynthia, moved from Florida to Carlisle in 2005 to be closer to her family.
Having a home-based business proved to be an impediment as the firm started to grow.
“Space in the house isn’t conducive to sales, operations or business growth efforts,” Stack said. “Our people feel more confident and more professional having an official Little Rock address over a house.”
Not that location matters as much in a virtual, software-based business. Stack, Pennington and the one other full-time Unityware employee are generally on the road working with health care groups in local communities.
So far they’ve concentrated their efforts in Arkansas.
“In our first proof of concept, we actually unified the systems in a community,” Stack said. “We successfully did that in Saline (County) and we are working on another up in Paragould.”
Stack said typically even a smaller hospital will have 15 different computer-based systems at work. What Unityware does is “make all the systems act like one gigantic system and then add whatever functionality they are missing,” he said.
The next step is to integrate electronic health records and community records from various clinics and other health care facilities.
Stack has been doing technology start-ups for nearly three decades but Unityware was his first in the Natural State.
“Arkansas sets itself apart, having implemented very effective resources to create a new high-tech company,” he said. “Who would have believed that you have to move to Arkansas to start a high-technology company?”
In January, President Obama declared his intention to have all of the country’s health records in digital form by 2014, with about $17 billion in federal stimulus funds devoted to the effort.
Stack estimated the nationwide conversion would cost closer to $80 billion, and he said early adopters of new technology would be the ones most likely to receive stimulus funding.
A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine estimated about 10 percent of the country’s hospitals have converted to electronic health records.
In Arkansas, only larger systems like Little Rock-based Baptist Health and the Sisters of Mercy, the Catholic charity that operates hospitals in Fort Smith, Rogers and Hot Springs, have begun the steps to convert to electronic health records.
The cost can be astronomical.
“We have one (hospital system) we are working with now, they had spent $100 million on a system,” Stack said. “They wound up trashing it before it was up and then spent $451 million to replace it.”
The system finally called in Unityware to help integrate its technology. Significant to its long-term growth, the company provides quick solutions that save its clients money, Stack said.
“We are in the business of making these hospitals compliant, without them having to throw anything out and get them there — now, today,” he said. “We’ve unified a community (hospital and health care clinics) in under three weeks. That’s unheard of and, by the way, it worked.”
