Is the End of the Standalone EHR and PM Near?

News this week came out that simplifMD and Azalea Health were merging companies. It’s an interesting merger since Azalea Health has been strong on the PM side of things and an EHR that’s not yet MU 2 certified, while simplifyMD has been more focused on the EHR side of things. As one company they can put together their PM and EHR into one standalone system.

As Shahid Shah recently pointed out on his Healthcare IT Guy interview with Melissa McCormack from Software Advice, buyers are decidely more interested in an integrated PM and EHR. Here’s one of the questions and answers:

1. As EHR meaningful use requirements grow more involved, standalone billing or scheduling systems are becoming less viable. In fact, nearly 70 percent of the buyers we spoke with wanted integration between practice management and EHR. The trend of PM buyers looking for robust EHR integration grows more pronounced each year, and shows no signs of tapering off since EHR meaningful use requirements increasingly require physicians to utilize charting, billing and scheduling in tandem. Vendors who can offer seamless integration between these applications will have a clear advantage over those who cannot.

I find this question interesting, because the trend towards an integrated EHR and PM started when I first started blogging about EHR software about 9 years ago. Now there are only a few standalone EHR companies left. There are more standalone PM vendors left, but most of them see the writing on the wall and know that they won’t survive as just a PM. In fact, some of those PM companies have stopped developing their PM and are just at a stand still waiting for their last customers to leave. It’s been amazing to see how long some of these extremely small PM vendors have survived.

With that said, is the end of the separate EHR and PM near? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

3 Comments

  • sMD realized a long time ago that without a solid PM partner we would begin to struggle. We were lucky to find an solid PM system that worked well with our EHR so we could combat the movement to integration. Still, even though we did our best to present the PM/EHR suite as (almost) one solution, we would occasionally lose if a savvy buyer looked under the hood and saw that it was two completely separate databases supported by two different companies.

    The integration movement is over though, and I think this an opportunity to expand on what we’re currently seeing in the industry. The real story is the growing movement to services and RCM with the expectation that an integrated PM and EHR solution will be provided as part of the deal.

  • Justin,
    The RCM and services movement is really powerful. I think that it’s really smart to take part in that area. Thanks for stopping by and commenting.

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