Practice Fusion is a free, web-based EHR designed to support physician office practices. Here's how the company describes its product on its web site:
You'll immediately appreciate the benefits of using Practice Fusion's free, web-based solution. Our user-friendly EHR can be activated in less than five minutes, eliminating the difficult conversion process that has become industry standard. Practice Fusion stands out in a marketplace dominated by expensive, complicated and ineffective EHR systems.
Here's an excerpt of an interview of the company CEO, Ryan Howard (see: Practice Fusion, #1 in EMR With 25M Electronic Medical Records, Debuts iPad App):
With great power comes great responsibility, and in few places is that more true than the healthtech industry. Practice Fusion is the leading provider of electronic medical records, now helping 130,000 doctors to track records for 25 million patients, CEO Ryan Howard told me today. That’s over 3x the EMRs hosted by Kaiser Permanente or the VA. Practice Fusion is free for doctors and patients. It monetizes through a marketplace for labs, pharmacies, and drug companies who pay for preferred placement in front of doctors who direct a staggering $40 billion in spend a year through the platform. Its new iPad app...will let these doctors access records while out of the office....Practice Fusion’s doctor and record uptake rate is growing exponentially. It counted 70,000 clients in April when it raised a $23 million series B, and by September when it took $6 million more in funding it had 100,000 health care providers on board. Now Practice Fusion is at 130,000, and with each new doctor comes roughly 2,000 new patients who can access their own medical records from anywhere. Doctors can begin using the product in minutes, and can pay to have all their existing paper records scanned in over a few days. Practice Fusion’s competitors can take 6 months or longer to get doctors set up.
To start, I want to emphasize the difference between an office EMR and a hospital EMR, which I have stressed in previous notes (see: Office EMRs as a Risky Investment for Small Physician Practices). Obviously, automated business and clinical record-keeping for an office practice is much less complex than for a hospital. In fact, that's why so many hospital-owned office practices balk at the installation of the same EMR software that runs in the hospitals. Such systems tend to be over-engineered for an office practice.
You can't help but be impressed by the simplicity of the Practice Fusion business model -- quick software installation and no charge for the service due to monetization "through a marketplace for labs, pharmacies, and drug companies who pay for preferred placement in front of doctors." The product is obviously the market leader in its segment. I am not sure that Epocrates EMR can make inroads in this market, having come to market relatively late but with a brand name (see: Ethical Questions Raised about the New Physician Office EMR from Epocrates).
I am also impressed with the availability of Practice Fusion app for the iPad, which I recently discussed in terms of the lack of such functionality for many hospital EMRs (see: Need to Enable Clinicians to Use Their iPads/iPhones for Access to EMR Data). I am sure that the Practice Fusion physician clients love this feature. The bad news about all of this news is that the physician office information domain seems to be moving farther away rather from the hospital information domain. How are we going to ever integrate these two critical healthcare information sectors?
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