Welcome to EMR and EHR

The people over at Software advice ran a poll asking essentially whether the HITECH act had created EMR buyers or just brought out the EMR Tire Kickers. Sadly, only 74 people responded. I wish I would have known about it and I would have promoted the poll so we had a wider audience voting to get a more interesting set of data.

The poll did essentially say that right now it’s brought out the tire kickers. I’ve been talking for a while now about how the HITECH act would actually slow EMR adoption (at least in the short term for sure). This poll basically agrees with that prediction.

The question remains whether those EMR tire kickers will turn into EMR sales. I’d be really interested to see the results of the same poll in say February or March. I think we’re going to see a tremendous increase in EMR purchases at that point in time.

There’s no doubt that Practice Fusion has been making a big splash in the world of EMR. They were the first EMR company that I’d seen that was pioneering the “free” ad based EMR on the web. You can read more about my first impressions of their free EMR offering on EMR and HIPAA. This interview with the CEO of Practice Fusion is pretty interesting as well.

Now Practice Fusion has made the next logical step and added a PHR front end for patients to be able to access their clinical record. From the look of the screenshots (see below), I’m not seeing anything particularly special about the PHR. In fact, I’d likely say that this isn’t much more than an initial PHR offering. Since it is their initial offering, I guess that makes sense. Certainly they’ll be building it out over time.

What I find more interesting about this new PHR is that Practice Fusion built the PHR on top of Sales Force. SaleseForce.com recently made an investment in Practice Fusion and so this seems to be an extension of that partnership. I see this as a really interesting move for Practice Fusion to build a healthcare application on top of the Force.com cloud. It also will be interesting for SalesForce.com to enter the healthcare space.

Check out the following screenshots of the PHR application: