Folio History

Folio Associates, a predecessor to FolioMed, was founded in the early 1970's by two advertising executives, Leon and Patricia Wirtenberg. Recognizing a need in the medical community for a directory listing all the physicians in Massachusetts they launched the first printed Folio’s Physician Directory of Massachusetts in 1972.

The original Folio directory listed physicians by name and included address and phone number, but because of the incompleteness and inaccuracy of any public records at the time, all the information had to be verified by sending individual Physician Proof Forms. And because there were several narrowly focused physician lists in the early days that concentrated on a particular medical specialty or metro area, Folio developed the approach of providing a complete census of all practicing physicians so that the customer was confident that a physician was included. Folio has maintained these two operating principles throughout its history (1) all information about physicians is verified and (2) Folio data is a comprehensive census of all practicing physicians in a state.

The printed Folio Physician Directory went from a bi-annual to an annual publication in the early 1980's and later Directories were added for the other New England states, New York, New Jersey and Ohio. Folio’s first directory of Chiropractors, Podiatrists, Dentists and Optometrists was published in early 2002 for Massachusetts.

In the mid 90s Folio Associates was acquired by the current management which introduced contemporary database architectures to the growing databases. Shortly thereafter Folio licensed the first single-use electronic version of its database. Later Folio introduced CD-ROM versions of its databases, developed network applications with data ‘ported’ into legacy customer systems or bundled with Folio’s own query interface, and finally in 2005 introduced its Internet Application.

As increasing amounts of physician data became publicly available in the early 2000’s Folio developed proprietary software tools to analyze, compare and mesh disparate computer files with its own reference database files. Leveraging this capability Folio developed a database management competence, ‘cleaning up’ legacy customer provider files and enhancing these files with its own reference database information. Increasingly Folio is called upon to design process solutions for the ongoing management of customer provider databases including the highly innovative, interactive and secure exchange of customer and Folio databases with complex matching and cross-identification of records. These solutions seek to maximize the benefits of both customer data capture and Folio’s own database editing resources.