Participants
Mark Ramsey – CEO
Buddy Bergeron – Senior Business Development Advisor
Discussion – PalmettoActive™ EHR Downtime Access
Buddy— Mark, you and I have worked together for over 20 years on various projects — archives, extractions, interfaces, and more. My question to you is: PalmettoActive, why now?
Mark — Buddy, it is purely customer- and market-driven. Our customers are not typical community hospitals. They are small, rural, remote, Critical Access, and Rural Emergency facilities. Downtime is not an abstract IT risk for them. It is a recurring operational reality.
They are not asking us first about cyberattacks or ransomware. They are asking about the things that actually take them offline: weather, climate events, planned software updates, construction, and the everyday power and internet outages that come with being off the beaten path.
Buddy — Like what?
Mark — Fire, flood, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes. The only thing we do not get is a plague of locusts. (Laughs)
Add the routine outages — a backhoe through a fiber line, a utility upgrade, a storm that knocks out power for six hours — and the picture is clear. When the lights go out, access to the hosted EHR usually goes with them. So does a reliable path to outside emergency support. The hospital becomes an island.
In that moment, the first concern is not compliance paperwork. It is patient safety. These facilities serve smaller populations, but those patients are often older, more medically complex, and more dependent on local care than patients at a large urban hospital. Staff know the names. Neighbors become patients.
In conversation after conversation, they have said the same thing: yes, we need a downtime solution. No, we cannot justify the price of the current all-singing, all-dancing products on the market. For them, a glossy ROI model does not matter if they lose a friend or a neighbor because the chart was unreachable.
Buddy — So how did that lead to PalmettoActive?
Mark — We had been building the pieces for years, one engagement at a time. Every time we archived or converted another legacy system, and every time we integrated that history with whatever the current system of record was — MEDITECH, Athenahealth, Epic, Cerner, Paragon hosted — we added another tool to the kit.
After enough of those projects, we had a serious bag of technology tricks. I sat down with the developers and asked a simple question: what if we used what we already know how to do, and built a downtime system that these hospitals can actually afford and actually use?
That is how PalmettoActive™ was born. We repurposed proven code instead of inventing a cathedral. The result is a highly affordable, purpose-built, portable downtime system for our existing customers — and for a lot of similar hospitals that have been told the only options are expensive enterprise platforms they will never buy.
Buddy — So Mark, what’s the secret?
Mark — There is no secret sauce. For 25 years we have listened to the customer. They needed four things: affordability, functionality, scalability, and portability. PalmettoActive™ Version 1.0 delivers that today.
And Version 1.0 is the point, not the finish line. There is more to come.
Buddy — Mark, I can’t wait to see it. Good luck to you and your customers. Thanks for your time.
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