San Francisco, CA-based Practice Fusion made a bold announcement today:
San Francisco, CA June 19th, 2008 -- Practice Fusion, the leader in free, web-based physician practice solutions, today announces the availability of its free Practice Management, Scheduler, Patient Management and Secure Email applications. "Today, Practice Fusion will change the healthcare industry by empowering physician practices in a way that has never been possible before," said Ryan Howard, CEO of Practice Fusion. "Electronic Medical Records are widely acknowledged to be a critical component in saving patient lives and money. Practice Fusion is pioneering by being the first to deliver these applications for free and via the internet to physician practice." [more]
Here we interview their CEO Ryan Howard:
1. Tell us about the impetus to start, and your biggest learning to date?
We recognized that existing vendors were not moving towards a unified model of healthcare in the near future. They insisted on using traditional enterprise software models that forced physicians to buy expensive and cumbersome software and manage it themselves. We found that the practices either did not know, or did not want to manage this technology. In addition, cost was a significant factor in the lack of adoption of EMR. As a result we assembled a completely free and on-demand model requiring no costs as well as no installation and maintenance of the technology.
2. What has been your biggest learning so far?
Our biggest learning to date has been on pieces of the market which we assumed we were unattainable. We originally anticipated that practices that had already made an investment of time and capital in an EMR would not be available to acquire as customers, but this was an incorrect assumption. We have had many practices who have invested tens of thousands of dollars in systems, such as Misys and Next Gen that have abandoned their investment and subsequently switched to Practice Fusion. What we found is that they are tired or paying expensive, on-going maintenance fees as well as the hassles of maintaining hardware and software on-site.
3. Why has EMR taken off so slowly, with so many failed installs, and how are you different?
The biggest issues with existing models are expensive costs, cumbersome implementations and hostile user interfaces causing slowed adoption. Practice Fusion eliminates all of these barriers to entry for physician practices by offering a free, web-based solution. There are no costs for licensing and hosting of the solution, there is no on-site implementation and we have one of the most intuitive user interfaces in the market. The result is that we are the small physician advocate.
4. What 2-3 firms are your key competitors, and how are you different? And what is your pricing model?
Mysis and NextGen are two of our major competitors. Their models are to change physician practices tens of thousands of dollars in upfront licensing and they typically take weeks to
months to implement their solutions, all the while disrupting the workflow, productivity and profitability of the practice. Practice Fusion is no cost, takes less than 5 minutes to set and provision and takes and iterative approach to implementation, where practices can effectively consume as much or as little of the application as they are comfortable with.
5. What do you have coming soon that we should know about?
We have a ubiquitous method to share patient records between any two physicians in the country without the installation of any technology or any integration. I believe it will fundamentally change how GPs and specialists collaborate to help patients.
Read more in our 25-page segment analyses, one each on:
a. PHR
b. EMR
c. News/Search/Community
d. Digital Home Health.
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