Dr. Pete Hudson

A little more than two years after Aetna acquired popular mobile health app-maker iTriage, its cofounders -- two emergency medical doctors -- Peter Hudson and Wayne Guerra have quietly left the health insurance company, MobiHealthNews has learned. A departure after a two-year earnout is a fairly common length of time for a startup founder to remain with their company's buyer, and while Hudson didn't divulge any details about the acquisition agreement, he told MobiHealthNews that he and Guerra stayed until they hit certain growth goals rather than until a particular length of stay.

"We are entrepreneurs," Hudson said. "We are passionate about big problems and finding disruptive solutions to them, and it was a good time [to leave] because we felt like we had knocked it out of the park and accomplished a lot of what we had set out to do. We also now have such an incredible team across Aetna and iTriage that it is in very, very good hands."

Hudson said since its acquisition in late 2011, as a part of Aetna, iTriage has almost quadrupled its employee count, quintupled its physician client base, added integrations for employers and other health plans, and grown its user base by about 5x. Hudson said that iTriage users now have increased session rates too.

The free iTriage app includes a symptom navigator feature that routes patients to local providers. It also offers emergency room wait times for certain hospitals, check-in features for some ERs, appointment setting feature for some physician offices, and more.

Hudson said that he and Guerra have no immediate plans for a next venture -- but it's likely the serial entrepreneurs will start something new before long.

"We were fortunate that this was a great outcome for our investors, our company, and for us personally," Hudson said. "So I think we are going to take some time personally -- we both have great families we'd like to spend some time with. Do some reflection. At the same time we are extremely passionate about this time in healthcare and the application of technology to help solve really big problems."

Hudson pointed to the still fractured nature of healthcare and health IT as a market ripe for disruption.

"If you look around and look at line item expenditures in healthcare, the perception of quality, and the number of third party vendors required to keep the system going -- it is just so inefficient on so many levels, and yet it serves so many hundreds of millions of people a year," he said.

"There is still incredible opportunity, but I don't know [what's next]. I focus 100 percent on whatever I'm working on."