Robert Hendrick Change:Healthcare COO

Robert Hendrick, the 42-year-old COO at Change Healthcare, told VNC on Friday that the company recently completed a $1 million Angel round of financing.

The Angel round was completed almost exactly two years after the company's million-dollar A-round, led by Solidus Co.

Hendrick said that by the time 2010 second-quarter results are known, the company could be profitable - and, he believes the company's valuation will be such that it'll be time to consider a serious B-round capital raise, soon thereafter. No target amount for a B-round yet, said Hendrick, but he added that he sees B-rounds as averaging $20MM.

Hendrick said there are numerous big contracts with insurers and third-party administrators in the pipeline, and just one of those is so huge it could realize the company's objectives for the first half of next year. Between now and then, the company will probably hire more data analysts and sales-support workers.

Current Change:Healthcare revenue? "Hardly worth talking about," said Hendrick (at left in cycling colors). He's more focused on the company's plans to roll-out strongly in the first quarter, with perhaps 250,000 users in the system, by that point.

Despite the social-media hype, Hendrick said the company's recent Twitter application was no biggie from a business standpoint. A programmer thought it up and delivered it in about three weeks, in his spare time, he said. The real significance of the Twitter app, Hendrick told VNC, is that the application demonstrated the company could open-up its API - its applications programming interface (principally, a set of standards and protocols - which allows developers to create new application mashups for use with Change:Healthcare technology.

This, of course, is what Apple did with the iPhone, which now sports about 86,000 applications to choose from, up from about 50K in June.

Hendrick said the formal debut of the company's API is set for January. Today, Hendrick and his colleagues are attending Health 2.0. ♦