Here's a recent and interesting blog note regarding a discount offer for physicians to install the Quest office EMR called Care360 (see: Quest Diagnostics Offers Big Discount On Its EMR-Practice Management System). I discussed this product six years ago, which at that time was called a lab portal (see: Quest Software Heats Up the Lab Portal Wars). Below is an excerpt from the current note.
...Quest Diagnostics has kicked off a program offering medical practices a steep 85 percent discount off of the retail price of its Care360 EMR and practice management bundle....The deal, which reduces the physicians’ out of pocket cost to less than $100 per month, also includes training, hosting, maintenance and 24/7 support for Care360. The lab giant says physicians can get Care360 up and running in about 45 days....[I]f I were a doctor I’d think long and hard before agreeing to a deal like this, even though the software is just about free. There’s simply too much at stake to plunge in. Yes, Care360 is CCHIT certified and, intriguingly, has incorporated the Direct Project specs allowing doctors to share information with patients and hospitals. And yes, it seems to have made efforts to support EMR access via mobile devices. This is all good. And of course, the price is right. On the other hand, I’m not sure I’d want to make this big of a commitment to any particular service provider, be it a reference lab, a radiology provider or the people who stock my vending machines with sodas. I’d argue that the more important the service is, the less you want to be beholden to the vendor. After all,what if Care360 isn’t your cup of tea? Do you really want to disrupt your relationship with a critical provider like Quest? Not only that, it’s risky to lock in an EMR just because it’s cheap. If Care360 takes 45 days to get installed, it’s not going to be possible to uninstall it in a day or two, and that could mean misery on wheels if the product doesn’t work for you. Besides, it’s possible to get Web-based, easy to adopt or drop EMRs for only a couple hundred dollars a month more. It wouldn’t make sense to go for an EMR that might not work just to save that little. (If your margin is tight enough that a savings of $200 or $300 a month is critical, you have worse problems than finding the right EMR!)
There is an old saying in healthcare software -- free (or almost free) software is never worth the price. The reason that such a product is usually not "free" is that there is some catch that enables the free or discounted offer. The situation also reminds me of my recent note about the Epocrates office EMR (see: Ethical Questions Raised about the New Physician Office EMR from Epocrates). In this latter case, the EMR displays advertising from pharmaceutical companies. Here's what I had to say at that time:
Very distressing to me, however, is the clear link of [Epocrates] and its software to the pharmaceutical industry. I have blogged on numerous occasions about some of the ethical and legal lapses of some of these companies....I have also reluctantly come to the conclusion that even apparently trivial advertising connections to Big Pharma can lead to mischief. I had previously thought that inconspicuous advertisements in EMRs by drug companies might be tolerated if the companies were to bear the costs of these systems. I now believe that allowing these companies even a tangential relationship to physician-office electronic medical records is too risky.
In the case of Care360, the potential risk, as the first quote above states, is "getting in bed" with the largest reference lab in the U.S. Such a relationship may potentially give Quest Diagnostics some edge regarding the reference lab business of the medical practice in question. Also and as discussed above, it's "possible to get Web-based, easy to adopt or drop EMRs for only a couple hundred dollars a month more." I am sure that the author had in mind systems like Practice Fusion, although I can't speak with authority about its relative functionality (see: Practice Fusion CEO Calls His Company the Largest EMR Provider).
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Posted by: EMR Software | July 31, 2012 at 08:58 AM
While the original author may have had Practice Fusion in mind, it has the same issues as Epocrates in that is it supported by ads (unless you pay the $100/mo/provider to remove them). Practice Fusion goes a step further and takes ownership of the anonymized patient records which it in turn sells. See http://www.forbes.com/sites/zinamoukheiber/2011/06/21/why-peter-thiel-likes-electronic-health-record-provider-practice-fusion/.
Posted by: Sam | February 06, 2012 at 12:46 PM