Educational programs aren’t easy to manage—administrators and educational leaders alike know that it takes not just one individual, but a village to raise students that will fully progress toward their goals. When it comes to educating future healthcare professionals, the stakes are even higher.
Durham-based LCMS Plus helps address the many inefficiencies found within those educational programs by streamlining everything into one enterprise software platform. LCMS Plus is a spinout of Duke University, and its software platform, LCMS+, helps universities and colleges manage the educational programs of their health science schools.
LCMS+ offers fully integrated solutions for health sciences education and is specifically designed to help with accreditation reporting, give schools automated personalized calendars, and provide tools that allow schools to import their own data as well.
The company’s Co-Founder and CEO, Allison Wood, said that Co-Founder and System Architect David Wiener was hired by Duke School of Medicine in 2005 to help the university create an internal comprehensive software solution for its healthcare education. The result became BlueDocs, which served as a precursor to Wood and Wiener’s current company. In 2011, Wood and Wiener officially founded LCMS+, which uses data technology to help provide better outcomes for schools.
“I think what we’re finding in education is that institutions are being asked to run more like businesses every year,” said Wood. “In order to do that, they have to have some systems thinking in place and tools that allow them to do that. This system, from the beginning, was designed to layer on some business thinking and rules to help with that.”
Comprehensive, Self-Updating Solution
The platform is designed to fit each school’s unique needs, Wood said. LCMS+ automatically updates with new information and integrates with incoming students and their new classes.
Adds Wood, “(LCMS+) is meant to be a single platform and does everything you need it to do as either a student/faculty/or administrator to lead students in their education.”
Wood said that the company hasn’t raised a dime and all growth has occurred—and been financed—organically. The company has expanded to a team of about 14 employees and has about $1.5 million in recurring revenue. The company has approximately 30 clients, including some international clients. Universities that use this platform include Yale School of Medicine, University of Singapore and, of course, Duke University.
LCMS’ progress has not gone unnoticed. Wood received the CEO/Founder of the Year Award in December at American Underground’s first “Undies” Awards for the 200+ companies that work at the Durham startup hub.
“We really are at the intersection of healthcare, education and technology, which are three of the most important sectors in society,” Wood said. “What we’re doing, in our own way, is facilitating the education of these healthcare professionals that are going to be taking care of you, me, our parents, and really everyone.”
