The Boss: Colin Barry of MEDfx, on a Penchant for Organization

When I was 10, my stepfather, a biochemist, introduced me to computers. He used to take me to his office at the federal Environmental Protection Agency, where I could play with the computers no one was using. I taught myself computer programming.

I loved computers so much that I would also go to the local Radio Shack and sit at a computer for hours. The employees used to joke that they needed to buy me a cot to sleep on.

Another passion I found at a young age was music. I learned to play the guitar and the piano, and, starting in high school, I played weekend gigs at clubs with local bands. That interest led me to my wife, Cara Mia, a nurse. (One of her friends was one of our band members.) We married in 1995 and have two daughters, now 11 and 14.

My father, Gerald, started a software consulting firm in 1984 in the basement of his house and expanded the business to his first office in Cranston, R.I., and later to larger quarters in Providence. At age 14, I started to write software for his health clinic clients to streamline the way they scheduled appointments and billed patients for services.

When it came time for college, I decided not to go. I was still very challenged by my programming work and building our company, then called G. Barry & Associates. Attending school did not hold my interest at that time. At first, my dad and I did it all, installing and maintaining the management software for our clients and making sure everything was running smoothly.

In 2004, my father decided to become our company’s chairman, and I took over as the chief executive and changed the name to MEDfx. It was a great time for us because the United States Department of Health and Human Services was rolling out several major initiatives to tackle the fragmentation of medical care information.

I wanted to help solve the challenge of gathering and organizing health data, so I restructured our business and hired a development team to build a health information platform. We worked with some partners, including several Fortune 500 companies, to come up with MEDfx Interchange, which is software used to share data among physicians, hospitals and clinics.

Using this software, federal agencies that deal with Social Security, veterans, Medicare and Medicaid can all talk to one another. So people applying for Social Security disability benefits, for example, may be able to receive a much faster determination because all their medical information can be accessed quickly.

We also designed a Web portal, MEDfx Lifescape, to make it easier for physicians, whether government or private doctors, to browse a patient’s medical history. Before this, if a veteran went to a private physician, it was hard for a doctor with the Department of Veterans Affairs or Defense Department to see his or her whole health picture.

We have since developed different components of our software to enable sharing of medical data among physicians and other health care providers. A Virginia statewide health information exchange, called ConnectVirginia, uses the software to help coordinate patient care and deliver services more cost-effectively.

Our work may seem very technical, but I’ve always followed my core passion of trying to use technology to help solve some of the most difficult challenges facing our health care system.

The Boss: Colin Barry of MEDfx, on a Penchant for Organization

When I was 10, my stepfather, a biochemist, introduced me to computers. He used to take me to his office at the federal Environmental Protection Agency, where I could play with the computers no one was using. I taught myself computer programming.

I loved computers so much that I would also go to the local Radio Shack and sit at a computer for hours. The employees used to joke that they needed to buy me a cot to sleep on.

Another passion I found at a young age was music. I learned to play the guitar and the piano, and, starting in high school, I played weekend gigs at clubs with local bands. That interest led me to my wife, Cara Mia, a nurse. (One of her friends was one of our band members.) We married in 1995 and have two daughters, now 11 and 14.

My father, Gerald, started a software consulting firm in 1984 in the basement of his house and expanded the business to his first office in Cranston, R.I., and later to larger quarters in Providence. At age 14, I started to write software for his health clinic clients to streamline the way they scheduled appointments and billed patients for services.

When it came time for college, I decided not to go. I was still very challenged by my programming work and building our company, then called G. Barry & Associates. Attending school did not hold my interest at that time. At first, my dad and I did it all, installing and maintaining the management software for our clients and making sure everything was running smoothly.

In 2004, my father decided to become our company’s chairman, and I took over as the chief executive and changed the name to MEDfx. It was a great time for us because the United States Department of Health and Human Services was rolling out several major initiatives to tackle the fragmentation of medical care information.

I wanted to help solve the challenge of gathering and organizing health data, so I restructured our business and hired a development team to build a health information platform. We worked with some partners, including several Fortune 500 companies, to come up with MEDfx Interchange, which is software used to share data among physicians, hospitals and clinics.

Using this software, federal agencies that deal with Social Security, veterans, Medicare and Medicaid can all talk to one another. So people applying for Social Security disability benefits, for example, may be able to receive a much faster determination because all their medical information can be accessed quickly.

We also designed a Web portal, MEDfx Lifescape, to make it easier for physicians, whether government or private doctors, to browse a patient’s medical history. Before this, if a veteran went to a private physician, it was hard for a doctor with the Department of Veterans Affairs or Defense Department to see his or her whole health picture.

We have since developed different components of our software to enable sharing of medical data among physicians and other health care providers. A Virginia statewide health information exchange, called ConnectVirginia, uses the software to help coordinate patient care and deliver services more cost-effectively.

Our work may seem very technical, but I’ve always followed my core passion of trying to use technology to help solve some of the most difficult challenges facing our health care system.

Barry Diller and Scott Rudin Form E-Book Publishing Venture

Two powerful entertainment moguls, Scott Rudin, the film and theater producer, and Barry Diller, the chairman of IAC/InterActiveCorp, are joining together to enter the turbulent world of book publishing.

Mr. Rudin and Frances Coady, a longtime publishing executive, have formed a partnership with Mr. Diller in a new venture called Brightline. It will publish e-books and eventually physical books in a partnership with Atavist, a publisher based in Brooklyn with expertise in producing electronic books and articles.

The alliance creates a new competitor in the rapidly changing digital book market, one that is dominated by Amazon, the online retailer, which has roughly 65 percent of e-book sales. Though fledgling, the new venture will enjoy the support of two influential executives who control a wide array of resources in media and entertainment.

Atavist and Brightline will exchange an undetermined amount of minority equity interests in each other’s ventures, and IAC will provide $20 million in capital to build out Brightline as a publisher in addition to making investments in Atavist.

Atavist, a start-up conceived by three friends in Brooklyn — Evan Ratliff, Jefferson Rabb and Nicholas Thompson — received attention for its content management system, which the group used to produce multimedia storytelling for various electronic devices. In May, Eric E. Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, was among a group of high-level technology executives who invested in an early round of financing for Atavist.

There were informal discussions this summer in which Mr. Diller and Mr. Rudin discussed paying as much as $10 million for a controlling interest in Atavist. A partnership grew out of those discussions.

“The book business has a concentrated number of players and is unquestionably in transition,” said Mr. Diller, sitting at a conference table at IAC’s Manhattan headquarters on Monday with Ms. Coady, Mr. Rudin and Mr. Ratliff. “There is a possibility here that if we start with a blank piece of paper that you could hit the opportunity that exists in the book business now.”

Mr. Rudin, who frequently works with authors like Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer and Jonathan Franzen to turn their books into films, said he had heard a steady stream of complaints about the opaqueness and resistance to change in the publishing business.

While traditional publishers are now releasing books in both paper and digital formats, e-book sales have surged in the last several years. E-books now account for more than 15 percent of publishers’ revenue, posing a challenge to the dominance of print in the long run and leaving the future of brick-and-mortar bookstores in doubt. Fiction has been an especially rich market for digital books: major publishers say new novels often sell more e-book copies than print copies in their initial weeks of sale.

Mr. Rudin worked for Mr. Diller as head of production at 20th Century Fox during the 1980s, and the two men have remained friends. For this venture, they decided to work with Ms. Coady because she was an early innovator in trade paperbacks at Random House and went on to work with authors like Augusten Burroughs at Macmillan’s Picador imprint.

They are hoping that a brand new enterprise, without the legacy costs and practices of traditional publishing, can find traction.

“Evan and the Atavist started this with nothing,” Mr. Diller said. “We are going to lead this with a lot of marketing money and investment. They want to do bigger things without losing control.”

It has been a remarkable run for Atavist, which was conceived over a series of beers in Brooklyn and began publishing in 2011 with articles built for tablet reading.

Mr. Ratliff said the offer from Mr. Diller and Mr. Rudin got Atavist’s attention because it was not just about the software.

“Other people came to us with various ideas, but this allows us to do what we did before, except bigger,” he said. “We have a partner with the same vision that we have.”

Brightline and Atavist will remain separate for the time being and the books will be published under the Atavist name. No author has yet been signed by Brightline, and Mr. Rudin asserted that the new enterprise was not an attempt to get an early look at books he might make into films.

“I already have access to all the books I need,” he said. “I am doing this for the same reason I do theater, which is that I love the work and this seemed like a good way to get involved.”

Instead of beginning from scratch, Ms. Coady said, the partnership will give Brightline access to the software, a place to market books in all forms and the design expertise of Mr. Rabb and others at Atavist. And Atavist will have access to big-name authors whom Ms. Coady and Mr. Rudin could bring to the table.

“The Atavist has put together a beautiful reading experience,” Ms. Coady said. “They’ve done so much so quickly.”

Unlike Atavist, Brightline will pay big advances to compete for big-name authors, but many questions remain, including how the new company will share revenue with its authors and how it will get printed books into stores.

Julie Bosman contributed reporting.