The company's mission was to "use the power of computing and the Internet to revolutionize the healthcare industry, stripping away its inefficiencies and inequities and streamlining it for the new millennium".
In mid-1995, James H. Clark, the founder of Netscape, came up with the idea to modernize technology in the health care industry.
[2] The company's first big idea was to develop a system for linking insurers and human resources departments.
However, the idea failed since insurers dismissed it as too expensive and human resource departments were not interested.
Five months later, the company formed a research and development partnership with Brown & Toland, a network of 1,600 physicians in San Francisco.