BusinessTN

Founded in 2007 as Simplex Diabetic Supply, Simplex Healthcare provides home delivery of medical supplies to patients with diabetes. In 2007, Simplex acquired Diabetes Care Club, and since then, the DCC brand has become the third largest mail order supplier of diabetic testing supplies for seniors, serving more than 130,000 patients. Simplex, which currently occupies 66,085 square feet of space and employs about 300 people, announced plans in August to expand its headquarters into a 91,253-square-foot-facility and to bring 300 additional jobs to Williamson County over a two-year period. Hudson is also a 2009 Alabama/Georgia/Tennessee finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award.

In the past seven years, Rustici Software, which began as two guys providing freelance software development services out of a spare bedroom of Rustici's home, has grown into an 11-person company that's a global leader in SCORM products. SCORM, or Sharable Content Object Reference Model, is a collection of standards and specifications for e-learning software products. The company has a wide range of clients, including the U.S. Navy and a small software company in Budapest, and as the online learning field continues to explode over the next few decades, Rustici is well-positioned to take advantage of it.

Founded in 1996 to build Web sites for physicians, hospitals and insurance companies, Passport now provides revenue cycle management solutions to more than 5,300 hospitals, clinics and outpatient facilities in all 50 states. Passport's products allow health care providers to verify a patient's address, run a credit score, take cash or credit card payments, process pre-certification requests and physicians referrals and other functions. Last year, the approximately 300-person company processed more than 130 million transactions. As hospitals struggle to maintain fiscal health, Passport, through facilitating better administrative and financial processes, is poised to help providers adapt to and emerge from economic/insurance-related challenges.

Launched in 1999 to provide consumers with an easy method to browse and select from thousands of magazine titles, Magazines.com is a Web site where customers can research, browse and purchase subscriptions from hundreds of publishers. Between January and March of 2008, Hitwise, an Internet traffic monitoring company, rated Magazines.com as the seventh most-trafficked site for the Shopping and Classifieds-Books category. Other growth opportunities for the burgeoning company include continuing to perfect its online subscription manager, which allows customers to track magazine subscriptions with an easy-to-use Web interface, and the fact that it's constantly adding magazine titles to its 2,000-plus catalog.

During HometownQuotes' first two years of business, the company operated out of a bonus room above CFO Bob Klee's garage. Today, HometownQuotes is the largest privately owned company in its industry—quite a feat, considering its largest competitors have been in business for more than 15 years. With 31 employees, the company helps consumers comparison shop for insurance by connecting individuals with local, hometown insurance agents offering quotes for auto, home, life, health and renter's insurance. Recently, HometownQuotes acquired the intellectual rights and phone licensing for 1-800insurance.com with plans to elevate the 1-800 number and URL as a nationally recognized brand and household name for all things insurance.

Founded in 1993, FAMC is a full-service, professional mortgage banker licensed to provide residential mortgages across the nation (with operation centers in Dallas, Boston and San Francisco, as well as retail offices throughout the United States). While other mortgage companies are suffering from the subprime debacle and housing downturn, FAMC is flourishing. The company also recently signed on as title sponsor for Nashville's 2010 Music City Bowl.

A network services and managed security provider, Cybera's solutions integrate all enterprise applications, including private intranet, Voice-over IP, credit/debit transaction processing, public wi-fi hotspots and IP video. Founded by Duffey in 2001, the company has about 80 employees and reports strong growth over the past several years. Cybera expects more with its expansion as a managed security service provider and launch of a new security and compliance product called Secure Link.

Led WMC through a major $83 million expansion and construction project aimed at providing better local care and keeping Williamson County residents from going to Nashville hospitals for services, including obstetrics/neonatal intensive care. Located in the state's richest county and serving a wealthy and well-insured clientele, the unaffiliated 185-bed WMC has long been an acquisition target of powerhouses like nearby Vanderbilt and HCA. Miller, an HCA alum tabbed in 2002 to run WMC following a stint with Birmingham, Ala.-based Eastern Health System, has used the influence of his area's demographic to maintain the hospital's independent status while simultaneously engaging in savvy partnerships with hospitals (such as St. Thomas and Vanderbilt) to enhance health care services for Williamson County residents.

"The 80-year-old family-owned residential homebuilder, originally from St. Louis but based in Tennessee since 1993, builds in 17 communities in five counties in Middle Tennessee. Out of the top 130 builders across the nation, The Jones Co. was one of only 20 that had an increase in revenue in 2007, according to Builder magazine, which ranked the company 33 spots higher this year, as the 129th largest builder in America."

"Rustici Software, founded to provide custom software development services, quickly discovered there was an unserved market niche helping Web-based training companies adhere to a standard called SCORM, or Sharable Content Object Reference Model, a specification that comes out of the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense. SCORM is a collection of standards and specifications for Web-based e-learning that defines communication between client-side content and a host system called the run-time environment. SCORM also defines how content may be packaged into a transferable ZIP file."

"Hospitals incurred about $40 billion in bad debt in 2006 as the number of uninsured patients continued to rise and the effects of consumer-driven health care increased the co-pays and deductibles of the insured. nTelagent, a next-generation revenue cycle company whose investors include former Province Healthcare CEO Marty Rash, has developed a proprietary technology platform that, for providers, improves upfront and overall cash flow, receivables and profitability by reducing bad debt and improving the revenue cycle process for self-pay patients."

"More than 1,500 hospitals and 2,800 physician offices and other facilities in all 50 states use Passport's products and services to get information (co-pay levels, physician referrals, etc.) from insurance companies and other data sources. In 2007, the nearly 200-person company processed more than 100 million transactions through its array of revenue cycle solutions. Passport recently acquired a 100-employee, 2,500-customer Illinois company, completed $144 million in financing from Goldman Sachs Specialty Lending Group to fuel growth and snagged two new majority owners through a $232 million equity infusion."

"Amid reports that almost half a billion radiology procedures will be performed annually by 2008, industry-wide attention is being placed on the collective impact of waste, fraud and abuse on the overall cost of care (not to mention patient exposure to radiation). MedSolutions works in concert with health plans to reign in costs associated with high-tech imaging, providing radiology utilization management services covering over 20 million individuals nationwide"