WebMD

Our products and services streamline administrative and clinical processes, promote efficiency and reduce costs by facilitating information exchange, communication and electronic transactions between healthcare participants. Clark and WebMD's founder Jeffrey T. Arnold resign from the board to pursue other interests. The legal history of WebMD Corporation began in December 1995 with the formation of Healtheon Corporation, but the company did not take its present shape until the 1999 merger with WebMD, Inc. In a sense, the men who launched these two enterprises cofounded today's hybrid WebMD. Healtheon's founder, James H. Clark, was already a famous entrepreneur before he turned his attention to the healthcare field. He was born in Plainview, Texas, in 1944 and endured a troubled childhood. His father earned money from doing odd jobs but suffered from a drinking problem, while his mother worked in a doctor's office to help support the family. After his parents divorced when he was 14, even though Clark was highly intelligent, especially in math, and enjoyed working on ham radios, he was bored in school and all too often found trouble. He let loose a skunk at a dance and set off a smoke bomb on the band bus, but did not get suspended until he told a teacher to go to hell. In his junior year in high school Clark simply dropped out. He enlisted in the Navy in 1961 and it was there that he resumed his education and launched his first business: a loan sharking operation that charged sailors 40 percent interest on money lent until payday. He earned his high school equivalency diploma in the Navy, and when he scored at the top on a math test he was promoted to algebra instructor. It was also in the Navy that he first became acquainted with computers and began taking college classes at Tulane University in New Orleans. Discharged from the service, Clark married and worked as a full-time computer programmer while continuing his college education. He earned a B.S. and master's degree in physics from Louisiana State University, then in 1974 earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Utah, where he began working on computer graphics. His doctoral thesis dealt with building special purpose hardware for 3-D graphics applications. With the intent of becoming a professor, Clark took a teaching position at the University of Santa Cruz, followed by stints at the New York Institute of Technology and University of California at Berkeley, before accepting a position as an associate professor at Stanford University in 1979. Along with six graduate students, Clark worked on three-dimensional graphics, developing what he called a Geometry Engine. He tried to sell the technology to such companies as IBM and DEC but found no takers. Instead, Clark quit Stanford in 1981 and founded Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) with his students. SGI quickly became a leader in workstation three-dimensional computer applications, which would find a multitude of uses, such as movie special effects. By 1995 SGI would be generating more than $2 billion in annual revenues, but Clark would have moved on by then. Clark resigned as chairman of the SGI board in February 1994, frustrated by the board's resistance to his idea to apply the company's technology to interactive television and digital game players. Clark's plan after leaving SGI was to pursue interactive television, but he quickly dropped that idea after becoming convinced that the Internet was the next wave to catch. The Internet had been around for a number of years but required knowledge of arcane and unforgiving programming commands. Then the University of Illinois created Mosaic, the first graphical user interface for the World Wide Web, which would revolutionize the Internet. Clark contacted the lead programmer on the Mosaic project, 23-year-old Marc Andreessen, and they agreed to launch their own company to create an improved and more commercial Mosaic browser. The result was Netscape Communica