CareCloud raises $20M+ to help doctors run their business in the cloud

CareCloud, a Miami-based company that provides cloud-based practice management tools for healthcare providers, just raised $20.1 million from Silicon Valley-based Intel Capital and Norwest Venture Partners.

“They must believe in us if they’re willing to spend money on frequent cross-country flights for meetings,” laughs Albert Santalo, CEO and founder of CareCloud in an interview with VentureBeat.

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CareCloud creates apps that help medical professionals run their businesses. Those apps include a community collaboration and communication platform to securely share patient information, a medical practice management system for billing and scheduling as well as a revenue cycle management app. Soon CareCloud will provide electronic medical records.

With the new funding, CareCloud will focus on producing more technology to serve the needs of healthcare providers.

“This industry is one that tends to lag behind the general tech industry,” says Santalo. “We believe a big part of what we have to do is continue innovating. To do this we will increase our geographic footprint and expand our sales and marketing teams.”

There are currently 85 employees at CareCloud, but Santalo says he plans on having more than 100 by the end of 2011.

CareCloud, which launched in 2010, is exceeding $500 million in accounts receivables under management for physicians and healthcare providers.

“The cloud is the place where all of the people in healthcare are playing a roll,” says Santalo. “We use it to connect all of the different players. Healthcare at is core is a social industry, but there’s wasn’t a good infrastructure to connect everyone.”

Santalo believes one of the reasons Google Health was shut down this year is that it didn’t strive to be social.

“It’s difficult to build a consumer-side platform and swim upstream,” he says. “The platform has to be built by the people providing the care. Also, it’s hard for a company like Google or Microsoft to be so many things. Healthcare requires a company that doesn’t care about anything else that’s going on.”

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CareCloud has received multiple awards in the last year, including being named a winner at IBM’s SmartCamp Silicon Valley and a runner-up at the IBM SmartCamp World Finals in 2010. It was at the SmartCamp competitions that CareCloud connected with Norwest Venture Partners and Intel Capital.

“The funding environment is interesting now,” says Santalo. “You read that investment dollars are flowing, but only the best companies and entrepreneurs are the ones getting funding these days.”