VALDOSTA — Physicians are trained to heal, not manage offices or personnel, grapple with insurance companies for timely reimbursement, or make sure their office computer networks are functioning properly.

Three Valdosta State University graduates are vying to come to local doctors’ rescue so the physicians will have more time to tend to patients by spending less time managing administrative headaches they were never trained to handle.

So good was the business plan drawn up by Baha Zeidan, Dan Henry and Doug Swords to create their comprehensive medical support business that they won the Valdosta-Lowndes County Chamber of Commerce’s Small Business Plan competition.

Their new business, Azalea Health Innovations Inc. (AHI), celebrated that victory Friday and cut the ribbon on their downtown headquarters on the first floor of the Wisenbaker Building at 100 N. Patterson St. across the street from City Market.

AHI has been doing business in the Wisenbaker offices since April 7, but the co-founders have worked on a part-time basis to assist local clients under the AHI name since 2007.

“The company targets small to medium-sized physician offices because that’s where they believe the demand currently is in Valdosta’s growing medical community that has ‘become a player’ in the region that includes Orlando, Jacksonville and Atlanta,” Henry said.

His partners concurred with that notion as well as the Chamber’s recognition that AHI is a perfect example of how young, high skilled VSU grads can be retained locally to provide much needed services here without having to find recruitment in larger cities for better pay.

“We’ve all been living here for quite awhile,” Swords said. “We’re not just swooping down from Atlanta, where we’d just be a small fish in a big pond. We feel like Valdosta is the perfect place for a business like ours to start.”

Other local businesses provide some of the products and services included in AHI’s menu, but none provide it all under one roof (see www.azaleahealth.com), the founders said.

The company can be contracted by physicians to help them meet a federal mandate to migrate all paper medical records and charts to digital files that can be accessed on an Electronic Medical Records (EMR) nationwide network by 2014.

The paperless network will cut out hundreds of hours of medical staff time by providing immediate access via computer to a patient’s medical records no matter where they’ve been treated, whether out of town or out of state.

That’ll save doctors thousands of dollars and hours they can turn back around and dedicate to their patients, the founders said.

AHI is licensed to sell and provide tech support for Praxis EMR software, which was ranked number one for functionality, ease of use and flexibility, service and support, and return on investment by the American Academy of Family Physicians and Family Practice Management.

The software services end of AHI is led by Zeidan and Henry.

Zeidan, AHI’s chief executive officer, graduated VSU with a Computer Science degree. During his senior year at VSU, Zeidan started working for Doctors Laboratory as an intern. Upon graduation Zeidan was promoted to network administrator, and now has extensive experience in network administration, servers management, interfacing healthcare systems, corporate firewall security, and more.