Letter to Emdeon

From MirrorMed

Jennifer, (Jennifer Newman works in the public relations department)

I am an open source medical informatics activist, journalist and programmer. I am doing an article on Medical Manager History that I am going to publishing on some blog, or maybe Wikipedia, (unless I can get a print magazine to pick it up). For some reason I can find nothing on the Internet regarding where medical manager came from prior to the 1999 purchase by Synetic. Part of the problem is there are so many press releases (20 years worth) and scads of articles regarding the SEC investigations etc etc. These things really have nothing to do with the actual details of how Medical Manager as a software product came to be, and that is what I am interested in. Can you find answers to the following questions.

I understand, from the grapevine that Medical Manager was started many years ago in florida. From that original company.

1. Do you have any founder names, prefferable people who still work with the company who would not mind talking to me? I am especially interested in who originally wrote the software.

2. When did the company originally start, exactly?

3. Do you have any stories of the "early years" that you could get to me?

4. Is there any resource of the history of the medical manager software that you have internally that you could share with me.

5. What is the aquisitiong history of Medical Manager? I am interested in any companies that were aquired by Medical Manager and what companies aquired Medical Manager. I am interested in software history so I am only interested in aquisitions that meant the software changed hands.

6. Is Emdeon currently supporting Medical Manager? Is Emdeon selling Medical Manager? I do not mean software that is meant to replace Medical Manager (i.e. Intergy) I mean the original codebase? I am asking about specific end-of-life policies, for instance Microsoft Windows 3.1 is no longer supported by Microsoft, But Windows 2000 still is (even though you cannot buy it in stores)

7. Do you have a version history of Medical Manager that I can use. I would like to see something that starts at Version 1.0 (or earlier) and then tells exaclty what major changes took place from the last version.

I want to make it clear that I am not planning on writing a puff piece about Medical Manager. My intention is to write an accurate history, I will largely ignore information from you that details "how wonderful Medical Manager/Emdeon" is. By all means send it, but what I really want are facts! I am quite willing to read tons of materials to get a good history so do not be afraid to deluge me. Also I am blogger, not a dead-line driven print journalist, which means that I will be taking all the time I need to make this good.

Regards,

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Fred Trotter