Practice Fusion Blog

A New Term and Movement for the Industry: EMR 2.0

This past week we have been preparing for the 2.0 release of the Practice Fusion EMR.  During this time I spoke with various press outlets, including Matt at MarketlIntelNow.  Matt, who is one of the individuals who truly understands what Practice Fusion is trying to accomplish in the market and how our approach is different, posted a blog about our product release here.

In the posting, Matt makes (what I feel to be) a very profound statement and coins a new industry term, EMR II… “Many docs were burned by EMR I, where turnkey software systems were found to be very expensive, overly complex and painfully difficult to integrate into their traditional workflows. Now EMR II is all about SaaS, and radically lower price points-- even free-- are being mapped by a new set of bold vendors like Practice Fusion.”

His statement nails the problems with the current big vendor approach and their failure in the market on the head.  He is also right-on about how we are changing the healthcare IT landscape. 

We spent a tremendous amount of time on our mantra of ‘Free, Web-based, No-risk,’ and we have delivered on it.  All of the hurdles and horror stories of traditional EMR I are eliminated with Practice Fusion:  1) There are no costs – it’s free for life.  2) Its totally web-based with no installation - no servers or consultants needed – it runs on almost any computer allowing you to leverage your existing IT investments. 3) The risks are low – you can sign-up and assimilate the product into your workflow at your own pace. For example, upload your patient data (we do this for you for free) and start scheduling.  Once you are comfortable with this, start using secure messaging to streamline communication in your practice.  When you have mastered this, start charting with the EMR and paper charts in tandem, until you r ready to make to full leap.  The transition doesn’t have to be painful – just see what our doctors have to say here. 

On a side note – we have many doctors that go through our live training (provided at no cost) who are so comfortable that they literally start charting with the next patient on their schedule.  You can go as fast or as slow as you want. This is because we have a constant emphasis on simplicity. From the sign up process to the user interface – everything has been assembled and delivered to be as simple and easy as possible and to eliminate all of the pain experienced with other vendors.

Hats off to Matt and MarketlIntelNow, who coined the term EMR 2.0. It fits the bill perfectly, and we are excited to be one of the innovators in this new movement.

-Ryan Howard
CEO, Practice Fusion

Practice Fusion 2.0 Is Now Availalble

Today we launched our latest incarnation of our EMR product suite, Practice Fusion 2.0.  There are some key attributes of this product that make it very unique and powerful in the market place. 

For starters, it’s an RIA.  What’s an RIA you ask? RIA stands for ‘Rich Internet Application’.  Rich Internet applications are web applications that have the features and functionality of traditional desktop applications. (More can be read about RIAs here.)

Take a look at the product screenshots here, or register for a demo or even sign-up (Why not?  There are no hassles, no obligations and no one will call and bother you!) and you will see that the user interface is extremely elegant, intuitive and simple – more so than any other application on the market. 

Next to cost and implementation, usability is a major key factor in the overall adoption of an EMR by a physician practice.  A poor interface will kill productivity and as well as cause anxiety and hostility when attempting to get your staff to start using a new system -  just ask anyone who works for Kaiser about the adoption turmoil experienced during the EPIC implementation (which from my understanding is still persisting).

As I mentioned in my last posting, Practice Fusion 2.0 runs on a Mac, Windows or even a Linux.  We are the first EMR company to have a product that runs on Google Chrome, Apple/Mac Safari 3, Mozilla Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 8 Browsers. 

There are also some very innovative features, including the ability to search across all of your templates and our extensive template library, view and copy past charts, see frequent diagnoses for the patient that you are working with, associate emails to the patient chart and more.

Beyond just being more intuitive and he new features, there are significant benefits from our new product.  I will detail these, along with other benefits from a Software-as-a-Service model in another posting next week.

-Ryan Howard
CEO, Practice Fusion