November 18, 2009
Practice Fusion throws its hat in the consumer ring
By Matthew Holt
Practice Fusion has been making a fair bit of noise recently with its investment from Salesforce and its trumpeting of 18,000 + physician users. If that number is true it probably makes it the most used EMR outside of EPIC or VISTA—bear in mind that AthenaClinicals only claims around 2,000 users. I’m inclined to take that number with a large grain or two of salt, and suspect that the number they’re reporting is “registered” users rather than “active” users. However, either way you slice it their “free SaaS-based” EMR model has put the cat amongst the pigeons (FD PracticeFusion was a sponsor of the recent Health 2.0 conference which I co-founded).
Today Practice Fusion adds a pretty important piece to their armory—the patient view and record called “patient fusion”. Below is a screenshot they sent me.
Now I haven’t reviewed the product nor seriously vetted their claim that it’ll be available to 1,000,000 patients already. But I can tell you that SaaS-based clinical groupware services like this one are an increasingly viable alternative to the traditional EMR vendors. And in these days of cats and dogs coming together, it’s good to see this level of innovation coming to the market.
November 18, 2009 in EHR/EMR, Electronic Medical Records, Health 2.0 | Permalink
Comments
Two things:
When you compare numbers you need to differentiate between physicians and users. For each physician you can have as many as 5 users on the system. I think athena is counting physicians when it says that it has 2000.
I'm not sure how an integrated patient portal is considered clinical groupware. I thought Clinical Groupware was a term for various technologies from various vendors that could be plugged in and plugged out per customer decision.
While I don't think there are any interchangeable patient portals right now, maybe Greenway's web based SaaS, PrimePatient portal, released in 2006, is a bit closer to the groupware notion since it is built on the Medfusion platform. athena has one too and most established vendors, like Allscripts and eClinicalWorks, do as well. They also have iPhone mobile apps for their EHRs.
Patient portals are quickly becoming one of the major prerequisites to selling EHRs to physicians.
This is not to criticize Practice Fusion's new portal, quite the contrary. I always thought that having the PHR reflect the actual EHR data is a much more powerful model than having a third party PHR. We had some lively discussions on this subject on this blog too :-)
Posted by: Margalit Gur-Arie | Nov 18, 2009 12:42:08 PM
Interesting, but not a lot to go on here. Don't make me do the research myself Matthew, I already have too much on my plate. :)
Yes, two smileys in two responses. Kind of cloying.
Posted by: jd | Nov 18, 2009 8:05:36 PM
I hope that they do a good job anonymizing data. Maybe hire some smart kids from Texas. To deter potential blackmailers, let it be known up front that I have an obsessive compulsion to read THCB. Sellers of health data no doubt incorporate safeguards to ensure that their customers are legitimate users of data and have safeguards in place. Even with those safeguards in place, a ChoicePoint-like breach with a pseudo-buyer as front for organized crime could still occur. Currently we lack a legal basis to charge deanonymization as a crime. I question whether even criminal sanctions upon deanonymization attackers would be sufficient to keep the inherent risks of the current system at a politically acceptable level, once the implications are widely known -- e.g., after the first breach.
Posted by: Devon Devine, JD | Nov 19, 2009 12:44:45 PM
Patients login to practice portals in 2010 – Providers login to patient portals in 2011…
Posted by: Peter @referralclick | Nov 19, 2009 7:02:40 PM
Post a comment
MOST COMMENTED
