Polaris Medical Management Inc. was created to let doctors focus on what they do best: care for their patients. Small practices were having a hard time negotiating with insurers, managing their contracts and billing patients, and companies were springing up to help them.

Members of the Rhode Island Primary Care Physicians Corporation – a nonprofit association of about 150 doctors in family practice, internal medicine, ob/gyn and pediatrics – decided to launch their own company to provide those services affordably to one another.

About 60 of the doctors bought into the new venture. They set up a board of directors, hired a staff, and let Polaris focus on business while they focused on medicine. It worked well for awhile – it still does – but then trends in medicine steered Polaris in a whole new direction.

The world began to embrace electronic medical records.

On their own, the tiny practices that Polaris serves, with about three doctors each, would probably have let the big doctors’ groups adopt EMRs first, and waited years until prices came down and pretty much everyone was doing it.

But Polaris changed things. Working together, and with a tech-savvy, business-oriented team at their disposal, the doctors had the resources to try to lead the way.

They considered a group purchasing arrangement, but they didn’t really like any of the products the vendors were offering. They were too complicated, too cumbersome; they tried too hard to be useful to all kinds of doctors and ended up being hard to use for all.

So the doctors decided to create their own EMR software. Dr. Albert J. Puerini Jr., president and CEO of Rhode Island Primary Care Physicians Corp. and one of the founders of Polaris, was among the first to try the software, called EpiChart.

It was March 2003, and it was rough.

“It was very basic, very rudimentary, so in the beginning, especially, I was able to shape this in exactly the way I felt a primary care doctor needed this to be,” Puerini said. “Now we have a committee of internists, ob/gyns, pediatricians, family doctors, meeting every month and inputting suggestions they get from other users, and their own ideas.”

“After you’ve done that for four years,” he added, “the system is really tweaked just for what the PCP needs.”

EMR software can be quite daunting. There can be layers and layers of pages, boxes and drop-down menus. The graphics can be Unix-style primitive.

By comparison, EpiChart is simpler and more user-friendly, with menu tabs and shortcuts that allow doctors, for example, to quickly identify all the information they’ll need for a physical on a 40-year-old woman, and even pre-write much of the text for their notes.

Like most EMR software, EpiChart also tracks all the medications taken by each patient, so a doctor can avoid adverse interactions and quickly identify patients taking a specific drug. And through SureScripts, a national collaboration, users can write e-prescriptions.

At this point, said Noah Benedict, executive director of Polaris, about 100 doctors are using EpiChart, which makes it the EMR with the greatest market penetration in Rhode Island – though EHR Rhode Island, an initiative by several large medical practices that have signed a contract with Massachusetts-based eClinicalWorks, will probably surpass it at some point.

But EpiChart is still substantially cheaper than most alternatives, about $13,000 for three doctors (less for members of Rhode Island Primary Care), and it has a specific niche. So while Benedict called EHR Rhode Island a “formidable competitor,” he and Puerini also said they’re confident that they will continue to be the first choice for the roughly 800 PCPs in the state.

In May, EpiChart earned a key credential from the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT), making it one of only 82 certified programs nationwide, and one of only 13 with both CCHIT and SureScripts certification. And for years now, Polaris has been a key player in the Rhode Island Quality Institute’s efforts to promote EMRs and, more recently, to develop a statewide health information exchange.

Now, Polaris is also looking beyond Rhode Island, reaching out to doctors near the state line whom it could serve from its Cranston base.

It also is developing a Web-based platform. “So we could ship this to Arkansas,” Puerini said.

Company profile: Polaris Medical Management Inc.

Annual sales: About $3 million