First try is the charm for Ellumen
On its first attempt at making the Fast 50, Ellumen Inc. came in at No. 50 with federal sales of $5.53 million in 2009 and a compound annual growth rate of 63.7 percent.
Ellumen Inc., which specializes in electronic health records integration and digital medical imaging, successfully made its first attempt to climb into the Fast 50 this year.
The company, based in Arlington, Va., came in at No. 50 with federal sales of $5.53 million in 2009 for a compound annual growth rate of 63.7 percent over five years.
Ellumen’s strong growth was fueled “by a little bit of luck, a little bit of foreplanning" and also keeping a tight focus on its core business areas of health care IT and health care data exchange, said William McCollough, principal, chief scientist and one of the company’s founders.
“We were able to land some long-term contacts and [other] smaller contracts along the way that allowed us to keep to our growth rate,” he said.
Those contracts included two five-year contracts from the Veterans Affairs Department with a combined value of about $27 million. The company also has won some smaller awards from the Defense Department’s Military Health System.
As a result, McCollough said he expects Ellumen to maintain a 60 percent aggregate growth rate in 2010.
“Our company operates the world’s largest health data exchange,” he said, managing millions of patients’ health care record exchanges between VA and DOD systems.
“Clinicians and doctors throughout the world use [the exchange] on an everyday basis to help the DOD guys transition into the VA, to share patient information at shared clinics,” he said. “Our software and services support all that.”
Founded in 2004, Ellumen was previously known as CPS Healthcare.
Its first contracts came from the Air Force for imaging systems development and integration. They led to image data-sharing projects for DOD and VA in 2006.
“We are now starting the process of diversifying into other health care IT arenas,” McCollough said, citing potential work with the Health and Human Services Department and various state agencies.
Ellumen has about 35 employees, but its continued growth will require more technologists and engineers, he said. With that in mind, the company recently moved into larger offices in Arlington, Va.