Provation's new CEO sees growth through more products, acquisitions

New CEO Daniel Hamburger says Provation Medical is reaching an "inflection point" as the Minneapolis-based health care software firm launches new products, pursues new markets and weighs acquisitions.

Hamburger, who has three decades of technology leadership experience in education, health care and other industries, joined Provation in November. Former CEO Dave Del Toro continues with the company as an executive board member after 20 years at Provation.

Setting the stage for Provation to reach "the next level of acceleration," Hamburger said, is its emergence as an independent company after its March 2018 acquisition by Santa Monica, Calif.-based Clearlake Capital Group from Wolters Kluwer.

"The potential is very high for the growth to continue in the U.S. as well as internationally, driven both by our own internal investments or organic growth as well as acquisition-driven growth," Hamburger said.

Doctors and nurses in more than 1,500 hospitals and 1,000 surgery centers use Provation's software to document procedures as they perform them. It saves five to 10 minutes per procedure compared with dictating or writing a report, Hamburger said, enabling clinicians to serve more patients.

New Provation products focus on specialties like cardiology, orthopedics and pain management, building on the company's leading position in gastrointestinal endoscopy procedure documentation, Hamburger said. Clinicians in 42 of the top 50 hospitals specializing in those procedures use Provation's software.

Platforms for practice management and electronic medical records are on the way, Hamburger said. Surgery centers, which have been slower to adopt those, represent primary markets for expansion.

Provation, which has close to 200 employees, plans a spring move to a 40,000-square-foot space in the Millwright Building in Downtown East from its North Loop headquarters.

Hamburger most recently was CEO of Renaissance Learning Inc., an education analytics platform. He previously was CEO of Adtalem Global Education, a $2 billion education solutions provider, and Indeliq, a technology firm. He also served as president of e-commerce for Grainger.

Hamburger has a master's degree in engineering from the University of Michigan and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Q: What is your strategic vision for Provation?

A: To help clinicians, doctors and nurses deliver health care to people around the world and to do that through productivity and innovation. Productivity plus innovation is how we got Provation in the first place, 25 years ago. That's where the name comes from and that's what drives us.

A: We made investments in standing up as an independent. We had to attract new leadership in many positions. Now that those things are in place we're ready to take it to the next level of acceleration. We have strong equity backers who are supportive of deploying more capital and were interested in bringing somebody into this position with experience in acquisitions, and I've done a couple dozen acquisitions in my background.

Q: What challenges do you foresee?

A: There's plenty of competition. We need to run faster and compete and do a better job every day. The other is the war for talent. We're growing, we're expanding, we're hiring. I would say we can't fill the open positions we have as fast as we would like so that's a real challenge.