Q. How do you compete with the Epics and the Cerners, or do you even try to?

A. You start with the fact that Epic costs hundreds of millions of dollars. You add the fact that it takes many years, and then you finish with the fact that it actually results in a closed system that can’t send information where patients want to go. There aren’t many hospitals that can afford Epic. The ones that can have already bought it. And, God bless them, they were the first movers. In a way, compared to nothing, Epic’s tremendous. But, compared to the Internet, it’s terrible. It’s atrocious. And, it’s going to be funny. A lot of these hospitals are going to go out of business. These second and third movers are going to over-commit their balance sheet to put in systems that are actually going to render them at a competitive disadvantage. They’re going to go under, and they’re going to go to Washington to ask for a bailout. It’s going to be an interesting phenomenon. They’re going to say, rightfully so, that the government pushed them into buying.

Q. It seems like the technology will have changed so much over the next 10 years.

A. That’s right, and you’ll keep current with hundreds of millions of dollars of fees to the [consulting firms] of the world, and upgrade modules and all this stuff. And, you’ll end up with this Frankenstein, or it will turn into a doorstop. Or, remember Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel – the children’s story? The Epic system’s going to be in the basement generating heat.

Q. The price of your stock today (Jan. 7) was $77 or more. Does that surprise you?

A. I don’t look at it. I can never figure out whether the stock’s going to go up or down. I did my best to try make sure that everybody who covers us, who has invested in us to hear our point of view why we spent this much money on one company all at the same time so we could at least get a crack at our side of the story. Whether that worked, or whether a butterfly is flapping its wings in just the right way in Japan, I don’t know. But, it seems like the world is supportive right now.

Q. Do you worry about growing too fast?

A. No. I worry about not growing fast enough. If we systematically started to grow faster than 30 percent, I would worry. We are not infinitely scalable, and we get more scalable every year. The guys in Maine and India, the automation team, make it possible to take on more revenues without requisite costs. It’s not infinite today for sure. We’ve been able to scale at that pace of about 30 percent. Some of our products are very scalable. Some are not scalable at all. But, the weighted average of about 30 percent growth seems to work for us. The problem, of course, is that 30 percent of a bigger number is 30 percent bigger than the last bigger number. And, that 30 percent is bigger than the next number, and pretty soon there’s some pretty big number. My real question is whether we can still grow at 30 percent more so that whether we’d have to worry about growing too fast. My concern about growing slow is, you know, you only have 5 percent of the doctors in this country on this network. Networks only work, having a telephone only works if there’s someone to call. So one of the key elements of this vision is that there be receivers coordinated on this network, so we need to hurry up and get more or nobody will want to be on it.