For years, public health officials and health leaders have been sounding the praises of EMRs, arguing that patients would enjoy safer, more effective care once providers went digital.

For a while, it was a tough sell, with surveys repeatedly suggesting that patients were suspicious that their data would be compromised or shared without their permission. Others seemingly just weren’t impressed with the concept.

Of late, however, it seems that the public has caught up, and may be well ahead of the provider community in its enthusiasm for digitizing medical records.  According to a new survey by GfK Roper, 78 percent of patients believe an EMR will allow doctors to give them better care whose doctors use EMRs believe that it helps the doctor provide better care.

According to Practice Fusion, an EMR vendor which backed the survey, patients are eager to get e-mailed appointment reminders, have their prescriptions sent electronically and view appointments online.

But wait a minute. Even if backing by a vendor hasn’t tilted the results, this kind of study doesn’t necessarily mean that patients really want an EMR as such.

My guess is that the folks surveyed by Roper have caught wind of a few cool things that more advanced medical practices and hospitals are doing (such as telemedicine, making test results accessible online and appointment scheduling) and they want in. Everybody likes convenience, no?

Somehow, I doubt they’re thinking about care coordination, sharing of medical records from one institution to another across an HIE, integrating data from various departments within a facility, creating data warehouses to do quality studies and so on.  They’re just starting to get a feel for the bells and whistles, some of which don’t even require an EMR to execute.

No, the truth is that it most Americans will never understand the clinical problems EMRs are designed to solve, as most will never delve into issues like risk analysis and patient safety management.  So their interest will inevitably flag.

But for now, we’ve got their attention. This is a moment — the EMR’s “15 minutes of fame” — in which the buzz is so intense that even consumers are getting excited.

Providers, now is the time:  Reach out and educate consumers on the value of your EMR investment while they’re still interested.  This moment may not come again.

UPDATE: As you’ll see above, Practice Fusion was kind enough to correct my understanding of a key part of of the study.  The idea that patients whose doctors already have EMRs in place are happy about it is different, of course, than saying that consumers generally want doctors to hurry up and adopt one. That being said, I’d still argue that even these patients are at a gee-whiz stage, and that their enthusiasm won’t last long. What do you think?

Here’s another tip I learned over the first year in my solo practice that has really added efficiency and productivity to my office.

Tip #2. Use an electronic health / medical record system (for free, if you can).

I’ll admit I’m biased here. I hate buying something that I can get legally for free.  And as far as EMR systems go, there’s more than one option on the market at the present time.  In my office, we use the guilty pleasure of Practice Fusion and have been pretty freaking happy for a year now. Mitochon Systems is another company that offers such an EMR system, although I confess I haven’t tried it.  Practice Fusion now claims about 60,000 users, although these are not all physicians. For a recent review of their stats, an interview with the CEO can be found at HisTalkPractice.com.  These companies often use alternative sources of income in order to avoid passing on their business costs to the providers and staff using their systems. In the case of Practice Fusion, we see small ads for medications at the bottom of the screen or off to the side.   For me, this is tolerable, and I don’t feel any pressure to prescribe these drugs. They are not popup boxes that would require you to close before being able to work on patient charts, and so this allows them to be minimally invasive into your daily activities.

In bipartisan fairness, there are a variety of systems that you can pay for if desired, and indeed there is a pay-for option to use Practice Fusion without the ads for around $100 per month.  If you have ethical qualms about using a reportedly “free” system due to supposed “hidden costs”, financial and “otherwise”, that someone else will need to pay for, then you may wish to pay yourself. Just please please please don’t make the mistake of thinking that free systems are somehow less capable or functional, simply because they are free to users, and “after all, how good could it be if it’s not expensive?”.  As the old saying goes, “Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.”  Now, as for my soapbox on drug companies and their tactics to ruin physicians’ ability to choose drugs they would really like to prescribe, we’ll have to save that one for another post…

Dr. West is an endocrinologist in private practice in Washington, DC. He completed fellowship training in Endocrinology and Metabolism at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. West opened The Washington Endocrine Clinic, PLLC, as a solo practice in 2009.

Full Disclosure: Practice Fusion and Mitochon Systems are both advertisers on EMR and EHR, but I’m not sure Dr. West even knew this when he wrote the post. Plus, Dr. West didn’t get paid to write this post either. He just loves EMR and is glad to share his good and bad experiences with it.

I know I shouldn’t post 2 humorous posts in a row (Yes, my Extormity EHR post was a joke), but you’ll have to forgive me. I just couldn’t resist. Go and read this post that has the CMO of Practice Fusion calling out Greek Philosopher, Archimedes (Thanks Michelle W for sharing it).

Now, ask yourself the question, would your CMO write a post like that? More importantly (and interestingly) would your EMR vendor post something as tongue and cheek as that?

Honestly, that’s one of the things I love most about Practice Fusion. They’ve imbued an incredible sense of culture in that company and there’s an energy about it that I just love. As an internet startup junkie, maybe that’s why it feels so familiar. I don’t really know, but it’s definitely a different type of EMR vendor.

I’m still on the fence on the product that Practice Fusion has delivered so far, but I can tell you that this is one EMR vendor that I’d love to work at.

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: