Calabasas-based Atlas Development Corporation recently announced it opened two new offices and expanded a third in order to meet the needs of a growing staff and client base. The company’s main division, Atlas Medical, connects doctors’ offices and their data systems – particularly electronic medical records systems – with those of diagnostics service providers, such as laboratory and radiology specialists. Atlas opened new offices in Dallas and Las Vegas and moved to a larger office in Kernersville, North Carolina, said Dan Nelson, the company’s vice president of client services for the Atlas Medical division. “With the growing number of staff we have regionally, these (moves) made sense,” Nelson said. About a year ago, the company only had a couple of employees working remotely out of Dallas. But the Dallas-based technical support manager quickly built the team up to seven employees, and the company decided to establish an office space in January, he said. The company doubled its Kernersville office space when it moved to a new site in January, Nelson said. The new facility has space where the company can host training seminars with clients, he said. Out of eight employees in Kernersville, three were hired the past year. Meanwhile, the company’s two owners will work from the smaller Las Vegas office, which opened last month. Growing business The company hired new staff to accommodate a growth spurt in business for Atlas Medical, Nelson said. “Even through 2008 and 2009, as the recession was going on, we were growing at 10 percent or more per year and now it’s actually increased quite a bit,” Nelson said, referring to the volume of new clientele. Money made available through the government’s Health Information Technology initiative has particularly spurred business, he said. The program use funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to offer reimbursements for physicians and hospital providers who effectively use electronic medical record systems. With more health care provides using electronic records, Atlas Medical has been busy responding to the technology needs of the laboratories and radiology practitioners. The company provides services to integrate systems of health care providers and diagnostics providers so they can share data more efficiently. For example, the company’s technology allows a laboratory to accept patient data in a consistent format, regardless of the various ways doctors’ offices are sending the information, Nelson said. He added that the company has gained new business through its in-house “ION” network, which instantly connects electronic medical record systems with those of reference laboratories. The network, which launched in November, is designed to eliminate the need to for labs to build new data integration models for each new electronic medical record system it connects with. The network allows the system to be set up just once, making it easier to connect to new customers’ systems later on. Future expansion of the company’s operations are planned for later this year, said Robert Gregory, Atlas’ chief business officer, in a recent press release. Nelson confirmed that statement. “We are recruiting again this year and so we expect to continue that growth,” Nelson said of the Atlas Medical division. Atlas Medical serves nearly 150 national and regional commercial providers of diagnostic testing and hospital outreach programs serving more than 75,000 physicians and clinicians. The company’s Atlas Public Health division provides software for health professionals. The Atlas Consulting division works with organization to create and deliver software solutions that deliver business intelligence.
