August 1st, 2008
Practice Fusion brings SaaS revolution to your doc's office
A SaaS revolution has started in your doctor’s office.
Practice Fusion, and CEO Ryan Howard (right) has signed up 1,300 doctors to its Web-based medical records service in just one year, and over 300,000 patient records have been input.
That’s just 1% of the market, but it’s growing in a viral way, which means everyone else needs to watch out.
(I have a much longer piece about Practice Fusion online at ZDNet Healthcare.)
Why are doctors flocking to Practice Fusion? It’s completely web-based, with live phone support, and yes, it’s free. “You can be up and running in a couple of minutes.”
The big objection is what do you do about the old records, Howard said. He calls his answer Live in Five.
“They might pull their active patients, and they might pull in ongoing diagnoses. But what they usually do is after a visit or two they know what they need to know, they archive and they’re done.”
Another big objection concers standards. “Our entire platform is web service based, supporting HL7 and EDI. We don’t need standards for that. But can we do standards? Sure.”
The difference between Howard’s SaaS (Software as a Service), approach and an integrated solution is what happens when those standards become necessary.
Practice Fusion will meet the standards transparently. With a solution that lives in your office, “you rip and replace.”
If you are running a small medical practice and tiring of the five-figure pitches from computing system vendors, I make no guarantee. But Practice Fusion’s price looks right.
UPDATE: Howard writes the job is aging him. Here is what he looks like today.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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