The problem with free EMR is that while it may be free from a financial perspective there are always other costs associated with free EMR. Here’s an example of a parts of an email I recently got about a new Free EMR. The company is called Practice Fusion and the following is excerpts from the email I received:

Today we have a press release going out (below) about Practice Fusion releasing a suite of physician applications, including Practice Management, Scheduling, Secure Email and Patient Management that are free and web-based. These are effectively ‘Google Apps’ for doctors - everything a practice needs to run their office, manage and schedule their patients, communicate with other members of the office – all web-based and at no cost.

I really liked the marketing angle that this company is taking. I personally am a devoted google apps user and I absolutely love what google apps is doing for me. Google apps is a completely free application that gives my businesses (EMR and HIPAA included) a whole bunch of business services with my very own branding. Most important of which are Email and Google documents. In return for using this free service, Google puts ads around the various services. A small price to pay for me to receive free email.

Turns out, Practice Fusion is offering a free EMR using the same model as Google Apps. My email described Practice Fusion’s free EMR revenue model as follows:

We generate revenue by embedding advertising, including pharmaceutical products, into our physician tools. We also incur revenue through the sale of anonymized patient data to research groups, pharmaceuticals, and health plans.

Basically, their planning on selling ads around people’s patient information. People are still freaking out about Gmail and Google apps placing targeted ads around their email. Why? Because in order to target the ads properly, that means Google has to search all of your “private” emails. Does this mean that Practice Fusion is going to be searching through all of your patient data?

Being completely honest, I personally don’t have much to hide and so Practice Fusion could have a hey day looking through my health information. However, I’m not sure most patients will share my same view. My guess is that most patients would feel very uncomfortable going to a doctor that is using a service like this. I think they’ll feel like their doctor was selling their information to save a buck. It might be one thing if the patient saved some money too, but that’s not going to happen.

Certainly a doctor using this free emr didn’t have to tell their patients that it was paid for by advertising and getting their information sold. However, could you imagine the backlash that would occur if they didn’t tell their patients and then someone found out. I’m honestly not sure how many doctors would want to take that risk. Sounds like the perfect 11 o’clock (it’s later in Vegas) news story to me. Lead Story: “Doctor Sells Patients Data to Save Money.”

Maybe I’m wrong and people won’t care about this or those that do care won’t find out. If that happens, then it’s hard for a doctor to argue with free. I personally haven’t looked at the feature set to know how it compares to other EMR vendors. However, there’s no arguing some of the benefits described in the email I received:

Practice Fusion offers a unique product to small and medium sized physician practices, which was developed using Adobe® Flex® 3 software for creating Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Practice Fusion’s solutions are web-based, require no upfront costs, no extra hardware, no large software applications to install and rollout, and no backend databases, which are required by traditional vendors such as Misys and NextGen. Where enterprise solutions may take weeks or even months to implement, Practice Fusion’s services utilizes its exclusive ‘Live in Five’ process to enable physician practices to be deployed and up and running within minutes.

Web Based - Awesome! Certainly the future of almost every software application.
No Upfront Costs - Nothing to lose, but also no motivation to avoid EMR implementation failure either.
No Extra Hardware - Very nice for the doctors. Not so much for the IT support people.
No Large Software Applications to Install and Rollout - I hate managing client applications. This is a big plus.
No Backend databases - This isn’t really true since they certainly have a back end database, but the point being you don’t have to manage the backend database. A nice benefit for most doctors.

Now a word about Practice Fusion’s “exclusive ‘Live in Five’ process.” I’m certain that it is true that they can create an instance of their EMR in 5 minutes. However, don’t be misled to think that you can spend 5 minutes and have a fully functioning and fully configured EMR. It’s just not reasonable to think. It’s a nice marketing angle, but it’s just impossible.

Think about this for a second. Assuming a very small practice of 5 staff. It’s going to take you somewhere around 5 minutes just to gather the information and create the user accounts for your 5 staff members. Now add in the myriad of other configurations you’ll certainly have to do and you start to realize that your EMR won’t be setup and ready to go in 5 minutes. In fact, my experience is that the EMR configuration process is an ongoing process that never ends. Practice Fusion’s free EMR could certainly argue that setting it up is faster than setting up other traditional EMR softare, but don’t be fooled by the “Live in Five” marketing.

One final thought before I end this. Let’s go back to my current Google Apps experience. What do I do if Google changes their mind and shuts down their service? There’s not really much you can do. Google’s giving you a free service which they can terminate at any time. Luckily a number of creative IT users have found ways for people to backup their email stored on Google servers.

I finally found a link to this topic buried on the Practice Fusion website. Most of that page talks about how their more reliable than an in house system. Interesting that they didn’t address what happens when your internet goes down and you’re left up a creek without a paddle, but that’s a topic for a different post.

The thing that isn’t addressed by Practice Fusion is what happens if Practice Fusion disappears. Sure, it would be nice to think that Practice Fusion will be around forever and it’s great for them to have that confidence, but it’s just not realistic. What if Practice Fusion sells to another company? What if Practice Fusion goes under? What if the free EMR model doesn’t work and Practice Fusion decides to start charging?

It does alleviate some fear that at the bottom of the linked page Practice Fusion says “It’s your data – always.” However, we’re not talking about a bunch of linear data like email. We’re not talking about something in a standard format that can easily be exported between one software to another. We’re talking about Practice Management, Scheduling, Secure Email, Electronic Medical Record and Patient Management. How do you expect them to provide you a “copy” of this data? Would be an interesting experience to try and see what they provide and how responsive they are to the request.

I’m not trying to be overly critical of Practice Fusion. Maybe they have a great product that’s worth every penny. Wait, of course it’s worth every penny since it’s free. Sorry I couldn’t resist. My point here is that doctors should be careful when evaluating free EMR software. There are certainly benefits to a free hosted EMR solution. Just don’t be blown away by the free tag and make sure you know the challenges of free.

By the way, I hope that Practice Fusion will respond to my various assertions and comments with a response in the comments. They seem like they’re pretty tech savvy. Just the fact that they have a Practice Fusion Blog is enough for me to give them some props (even if they did use typepad and not wordpress). You can expect some future blog posts linking to their blog.

This Friday, July 11, the new Apple iPhone 3G becomes available to the public. The new $199 iPhone 3G will make mobile applications even more accessible to consumers and professionals. Healthcare is one of the most popular topics among consumers, and the iPhone 3G enables consumers to access many new healthcare applications including the free A.D.A.M. Symptom Navigator. According to Harris Interactive, nearly 117 million Americans have searched for health information online. Eighty-five percent of those have searched one or more times per month.

The free Symptom Navigator for the iPhone 3G helps consumers match medical symptoms with relevant assessments and appropriate treatments. Symptom Navigator empowers consumers to make the best use of the healthcare system and understand when self-care or a doctor visit is appropriate. To access the Symptom Navigator on the iPhone 3G, visit http://iphone.adam.com[Don't try to go there in a regular browser]. The tool offers possible causes of the symptom and medical condition, how to self treat, when it is an emergency, when you should call a doctor, and how to prevent it in the future.

Here’s my take on the two questions I posed above:

1. Should patients be diagnosing themselves?
The application described above is a very interesting idea. It’s also true that patients are trying to self diagnose whether we like it or not. I know that when something happens to myself or my kids, I always check what’s online. However, I don’t always trust what’s online. I just take it for what it’s worth and then use that to help me communicate in a more effective way with my doctor.

This iPhone application takes patient diagnosis of problems to the next level. I’m not sure I trust an iPhone to diagnose me. As a consumer, would I really benefit from the information it offers? There’s just something really comforting about calling and talking to someone and hearing someone’s voice tell you that your child is going to be fine and not to worry about it or instructions to take them to the doctor as soon as possible to resolve whatever issue they have. I don’t think I’ll get that same satisfaction out of an iPhone health application. Most likely what I’d see happening is people would check that application and then call the nurse just the same. Something every nurse and doctor in the country loves. Patients trying to diagnose themselves.

I also wonder what’s going to happen when the iPhone application misdiagnoses a person and tells them to stay home when they should be rushed to the hospital. Can you imagine the liability this company will have if someone dies because their iPhone told them not to worry about it? Makes me wonder how this company got investment. Now, I’m sick of liability ruining innovation, but you just have to wonder when we’re talking about life and death.

I should also mention that I’m a nerd by profession. If I, being a nerd, don’t think I’d use a service like this I wonder how many less computer literate people will be interested in this application.

2. Should EMR companies provide an EMR interface on the iPhone?
The first person I ever saw with an iPhone was actually a doctor I know. I wonder if he’s ever tried to access his EMR using his iPhone. The above email made me wonder how useful would it be to have an iPhone interface for doctors to access their EMR.

Of course, there’s no arguing the portability of the iPhone and the latest iPhone’s 3G technology means that it should have the bandwidth necessary to accomplish such a task. However, the iPhone is much like Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS). DNS can pretty much work with any EMR. However, there are deep integrations that can be done with DNS that take DNS from a pure data entry application into something much more powerful. The iPhone can pretty much work with any web based EMR that works with the safari web browser. However, without an EMR interface designed for the iPhone, a doctor won’t benefit from all of the cool user interface and touch screen features the iPhone offers. Does this mean that EMR companies should build a special iPhone interface for doctors?

This is an important question for almost every EMR company. Even client server based EMR products need to ask themselves if they should build a special web based interface for the iPhone. Just because your a client server based EMR doesn’t mean that you can’t build another interface using web based technology. The question is should you?

The answer to the question becomes rather clear when you think about what advantages a doctor receives by being able to access their EMR on an iPhone. Most doctors have NEVER accessed their EMR on their phone. Those doctors I know that have accessed their EMR on their phone fall into one of the following two camps:
1. Tired of scrolling
The first category of EMR users said that accessing their EMR on a phone was painstaking because the scrolling was a constant annoyance. I think we’re all getting spoiled with big 19″ monitors. I know I’ve connected to some of my servers using a phone and scrolling was the biggest problem for me. So much so that I never tried it again. A number of companies are working on roll up screens, but until that happens scrolling seems apart of an internet phone experience. Certainly some could argue that with the iPhone you have an easier method of scrolling. This is certainly true, but it still only slightly diminishes the pains of scrolling in my book.
2. Just meds and allergies
This group seems sensible. What if an EMR vendor offered a small subset of the EMR that was available on the iPhone (or any cellular phone for that matter). Knowing someone’s medications and allergies would be nice to have available on your phone when your visiting a hospital. Why not be able to browse your EMR’s schedule of appointments on your iPhone. Many people probably do that now, but I’m not talking about synching your phone with your calendar. I’m talking about a true real time view of your appointments for that day. Would certainly be a nice way to prevent the doctor getting upset with someone from the front desk because his calendar wasn’t up to date with what was stored in the EMR.

It’s easy to see the advantages of offering a subset of your EMR information on the phone. There’s a lot of things that are useful that won’t ever happen. Unfortunately, I think this is one of those features. At least for now, I don’t know many doctors who are asking for phone integration as part of the EMR RFP process. EMR vendors are in the business of selling EMR software. If their users aren’t demanding it, then I don’t see many EMR vendors providing it.

No, I won’t be surprised if some EMR vendor comes out with an iPhone interface. Some EMR companies could do it rather quickly because of the way their EMR is designed and they might as well enjoy a little bit of PR benefit from having an iPhone application. I’ll be excited to see what that company provides, but don’t count on many EMR vendors to follow suit. It just wouldn’t be smart business for most.

One final thought. The iPhone has been a real internet darling that has garnered lots of good press. It’s what Steve Jobs is great at doing and the iPhone is no exception. The problem is that the last time I checked, the iPhone was less than 2% of all the phones sold in the US. The incredible user interface of the iPhone can’t be argued. The problem is that software companies very rarely want to develop software for 2% of the market. Until iPhone establishes user interface standards that other companies adopt, don’t expect EMR companies to start developing software for the iPhone.

The biggest benefit is that it almost forces doctors, nurses, front desk staff, lab, pharmacy, etc to sit down and think about our EMR, how it could be made better and which parts of the EMR are just causing them pains, problems, frustrations, or other discomfort. We tried to make sure that each EMR meeting went over: our current EMR challenges, features of the EMR that we aren’t using and finally discuss ideas for enhancements to the EMR software.

We’re lucky that we selected a smaller EMR vendor that’s completely focused on the college health EMR market. That means that we have a strong relationship with the EMR company. In our final meeting the EMR “trainer” said that they really are our “partner” in not just the EMR, but they’re willing to support us beyond just software. The nice thing is that our EMR vendor really does try to do this. They don’t always succeed at it, but they certainly are sincere in their effort.

Another major benefit of having someone from the EMR vendor do a site visit is that they are looking at your clinic with fresh eyes. They can see things about the way your process works that you may not see. Plus, they have usually been to hundreds of other EMR installs and so they are aware of how other clinics are using the EMR software.

Of course, you can’t expect someone from your EMR vendor to come and work miracles. In fact, many of the ideas they have just may not work for the way you practice medicine. It takes a solid filter to be able to see the benefits, problems, and workarounds that will work best for your standards of care, legal regulations, and clinical organization. The biggest problems that an EMR vendor faces is that it’s really hard to build a one size fits all EMR. Different practices act differently. However, there’s something really valuable about discussing the various options of an EMR.

I highly recommend this type of collaborative approach to working with your EMR vendor. I believe it’s paid amazing dividends for our clinic. In the end, your EMR company better be a good partner or you’ll pay the price later.

It’s been a long time coming and so it will be interesting to finally take a look under the hood. I haven’t personally had enough time to do a full analysis of Google Health myself, but techcrunch posted the announcement live and an initial review.

I think that techcrunch summed up a major part of Google Health and its meaning for EHR software in the following:

Google is planning to open up APIs to Google health to make it easy for other partners to tap into its health platform. And make no mistake about it. That is what this is: a platform. Health apps anyone?

Sure does make for some interesting thinking about how an EMR or EHR could integrate with Google Health. Depending on how my next couple days go, I may see if Google Health has given any sort of specifications for importing a patient record into Google Health from an EMR or EHR software program. In my previous posts it was said to use some form of CCR to integrate Google Health with EMR and EHR software. I hope this is the case. If it is, I think I’ll try to be the first to integrate Google Health with my EMR. I don’t think most of it would be that difficult.

We worked for an entire year testing, making requests, testing, more requests and more testing before we were able to launch an interface between our lab and EMR, but it’s been one of the best things we’ve done. The reason it took so long is the topic of another post, but it was for good reason.

One of the best advantages to a lab interface with your EMR is that you don’t have to worry about what to do with all those paper labs that you’ve signed. Inevitably all those signed paper labs will have to be scanned and attached to a patient in your EMR.

Really, that’s why a lab interface is so much better. The interface inserts the lab info right into your EMR so you don’t have to worry about:
1. Losing your lab results (before or after you sign it)
2. No need to scan your signed lab results into your EMR
3. You can run really cool reports on the data from those labs in your EMR (ie. blood sugar change over time)
4. Most EMR will notify you that there are lab results to read, so there’s no more waiting for the paper to somehow make it to you

In our EMR, a lab result gets easily signed off with the click of a check mark. Actually our labs our grouped into batches according to labs that were ordered at the same time. This makes it so all our lab results appear on one nice lab report as opposed to one lab report per lab. All doctors have to do is highlight all the labs and click “Mark as Read” and that whole batch of lab results are signed electronically in the EMR.

Of course, many of you will probably ask how we handle abnormal results. Well, I guess you’ll just have to wait to learn about that.

My job is to implement this EMR the best way possible. That’s what I do. It doesn’t matter if it’s good bad or ugly. It’s counter productive for me to rate how good my EMR is. It is what it is. I haven’t been assigned the task of selecting an EMR. I’m not paid right now to see what other EMR vendors might be better than the one I have. I’m paid to do my very best at implementing the EMR that was chosen.

I don’t want to sound harsh here, but I think that many of the EMR failures are due to people worrying too much about what other EMR software can do and not enough about what their EMR software can do. The question shouldn’t ever be, can our EMR software do this? Instead you should ask, “how can we do this with the EMR software we’ve chosen?” This is two very different perspectives that reap very different results.

I’m not talking about someone who is in the process of selecting an EMR. I’m talking about someone who has already selected an EMR. It reminds me about one of my favorite quotes about marriage that says, “When you’re dating keep both eyes wide open, when you get married keep them closed.” You could just as easily say, “When selecting an EMR keep both eyes wide open, but once you’ve chosen an EMR keep both eyes closed and make the most of it.”

Of course, one thing I can’t help doing is answering people’s questions about EMR. I’ve had dozens of people call me about my EMR and I just love talking to them about the benefits, challenges and hassles of my EMR.

Do you want to improve the U.S. health care system? Or at least be part of the much-needed dialogue?

If you have ideas or solutions to improve the system, submit your ideas through ChangeNow4Health’s Innovation xChange and you can win up to $10,000 or have your ideas published in the e-book, Tomorrow’s Health Care.

The Innovation xChange is looking for practical ideas and suggestions for improving the health care system. All participants in the system, from providers and health plans to consumers and government, are encouraged to join in the discussion.

$10k isn’t a ton of money, but for just submitting an idea it’s not too bad. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with the contest and what kind of creative ideas come out of it. I wonder if any EMR applications or EMR features will make it into the contest.

Business Intelligence to me is really just about being able to look at large amounts of data in really cool ways. EMR is basically synonymous with the concept of large amounts of data. Each and every day thousands of really interesting pieces of information are being entered into an EMR. Many times this data is organized in such a way that in can be easily accessed and reported on.

For my class, we’ve been using SQL Server 2005’s business intelligence components. While Microsoft may have its downfalls, they really have put some thought and effort into SQL Server 2005’s BI components. For my final project, I decided to extract some appointment data from my EMR (yes, I guess it’s really my PMS, except for things like the room for the appointment) and run some BI analysis on the EMR data.

I actually had to anonymize all the EMR data before using it, because I was working in a group where they weren’t allowed access to all the HIPAA related information. However, it wasn’t too big of a deal in the end. Although, it does lose some of the reporting ability when you do that.

Since we ended up only pulling out simple appointment data from the EMR database, we could only really run reports about appointments. Don’t get me wrong. There is some really cool stuff you can report on appointments. We reported on appointments by date (this includes day, month, quarter, year, etc), provider, gender, birthdate, ethnicity, etc. We also uploaded the room number that an appointment used so that we could measure the utilization of our exam rooms. Luckily our EMR stored all the information about exam rooms. We also pulled in the data that described when a patient arrived at the clinic, when the nurse started the intake and when the provider finally saw them. We haven’t actually built any reports on that time study data, but it would be really interesting.

That’s really just the beginning of what we were able to do with the EMR data, but I think you get the point. The real question at this point is what other EMR data could benefit from some quality BI analysis? Here’s a few of my thoughts:

-Blood pressure - Depending on how this is stored will determine how easy it is to report. However, it would be really interesting to see trends in blood pressure across our entire population. Add in a few filters for certain medications and you could see some amazing results
-Average Charge per Patient - Could be interesting to look at this and identify which patients are the most profitable. Wait, doctors aren’t about profit are they?
-Average Number of Visits per Patient - Would be interesting to see this grouped too.

Those are just a few off the top of my head. I’m sure there are a hundred more that could be done with diagnosis, prescriptions, charges, procedures, referrals, etc etc etc. Which reports would you find interesting from the data in your EMR?

The best part of this all is that in the next couple weeks I have planned to upgrade my EMR from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005. That means that I could really easily use all th SQL Server BI tools to create the various BI reports with all the data in my EMR.

Has anyone else done this type of EMR reporting before?

Certainly you could make a good case that a patient portal or EHR is more Health 2.0. In fact, that really seems to cut to the heart of Health 2.0. Creating a powerful interface between doctors and patients so that patients are a part of the process. However, I think that most EMR in their current state don’t benefit from this type of interaction.

Of course, this begs the question of whether an EMR should have this type of interaction. My short answer is that it should, but until the payment systems catch up with the technology that creates these interactions we won’t see broad Health 2.0 application to EMR software.

I recently came across a list of the top 100 Open Source Software Tools for Medical Professionals.

You know I’m a sucker for a list and I especially like EMR lists, so here’s their top 10 open source EMR software:
1. FreeMED
2. OpenEMR
3. OpenEMR Current
4. OpenEMR Virtual Appliance
5. FreeB
6. SmartCare
7. XChart
8. OpenMRS
9. Open Dental Software
10. ClearHealth

Quite an interesting list to choose from. Now if I could just get the data on number of installs for these applications. When I mean installs I mean doctors who actually use these open source EMR systems every day in their practice. Anyone want to let us know where we can find that data? Or any open source EMR packages want to fill us in on their progress?

I’ll update the post if I find anything or get that information in the comments.

Interesting. I wonder why none of these are CCHIT certified?