A free Ad-based EMR

I wanted to call your attention to Dr. Scott Shreve’s posting about Practice Fusion and ad-driven revenue. Having built out half dozen EMRs in my career, it’s good to see a company like Practice Fusion giving adware a try — I don’t think they have anything to lose.

I hope they can succeed where other EMRs have failed (or at least not done so well). The technology behind EMRs is embarrassingly easy to create nowadays — most EMRs are just simple databases that act like electronic typewriters and simple filing cabinets. In fact, kids in high school doing game programming are doing more difficult things with computer science concepts than EMRs. What’s really hard about EMRs are dealing with the integration and usability headaches — which are no easy tasks. However, if you create a single-site solution where all the users connect together in one place and not have to worry about cross-site integration and the mismatch between concepts across EMR packages then it could be a winning solution.

Apparently hundreds of docs have already signed up for the free Practice Fusion site. If they can get the adware EMR concept accepted perhaps this will open up other healthcare IT service solutions in the same category. Lots to look forward to!