In honor of our fortieth anniversary in 2019, we will be posting a series of posts from our founder, Jack Marston, Sr., reflecting on where we’ve been, where we are, and where we plan to go. These will be posted on the first three Wednesdays in February.
In recognizing the fortieth anniversary of Custom Data Processing, Inc. (CDP), it’s important to understand the world in which we lived in the 1970s.
Prior to creating CDP, I spent several years selling large mainframe computers. They were big, they were bulky, and they were expensive, which limited sales to only the larger organizations who could afford the space and money.
With that in mind, CDP was born with the goal to provide computer software services to smaller organizations at affordable prices (Software as a Service, or SaaS). We started out by purchasing resource time on computers at the larger firms I had developed a relationship with as their salesperson.
As the number of clients and applications we supported grew, we were able to purchase our own computer hardware to continue expanding our SaaS activity.
The initial product that we built was related to the home healthcare sector. The goal of the project was to create an application for clinical home healthcare services which included scheduling visits to patient homes, providing healthcare services to patients, and billing for each home health clinic.
The work we were doing on that project jumped significantly when we won a contract in the public healthcare sector of Kentucky. With the successful installation of our home healthcare services at this clinic, we had a swath of new customers in the government marketplace. It didn’t take long before the home healthcare application created by CDP was used in all of Kentucky’s public health clinics.
The director of environmental health services in Kentucky had observed the successful home healthcare application and decided to contract with CDP to develop an application to house all of the establishments in the state that were being inspected in an online and real-time environment, hosted on CDP’s computer system. This application scheduled and tracked inspection activity, performed billing tasks, and printed certification documents after inspections.
Finding a niche in public healthcare, we continued our growth by creating additional systems. After all, public health entities still have employees and bills to pay, as well as billing to control. The next application we created was a public health financial system that provided employee time tracking, payroll processing, accounts payable, billing, and receivables tracking. Like the other applications, it didn’t take long before these systems and services were in use at multiple user sites. In fact, all three of these systems are still utilized today.
It was a different world in the seventies and early eighties. It didn’t take long before we realized that this was where we needed to be. Just seven years after our inception, we added more to our portfolio that would set a course for the company’s mission to serve those in the public health sector. Find out next week in Forty Years of Making a Difference: Where We Are.