Healthy returns

The path Voalte took to become a creative destructor in the mobile health care communications industry was initially a disadvantage.

That's because the Sarasota-based firm, which uses smart phones to allow nurses and hospital employees to communicate with each other, was way ahead of its time, Voalte President Trey Lauderdale says. Most of the clients it targeted for business — hospitals and medical centers — weren't ready to make such a seismic shift in 2009 and 2010, when the firm was a startup. Even today, some hospitals cling to a 1990s form of internal communications: beepers and pagers.

Says Lauderdale: “We were too early in a laggard market.”