GE Finance at HIMSS Ready to Finance EHR

HIMSS is far gone now, but I have an enduring thought in my head that I can’t let pass. I was reading through my Twitter stream during HIMSS and one person commented (sorry I forgot who) about GE Finance having a prominent presence at HIMSS. How nice of GE to provide one stop shopping for doctors. Get an EHR and your financing all in one spot.

Ok, so I’m being a little facetious. It’s just really interesting to see how many doctors approach the financing of an EHR.

If you look at the EMR and EHR matrix of companies I’ve started to create, you can see that there’s still a large number of EMR and EHR companies that are going with the standard one time fee plus annual maintenance. However, I must admit that I’ve been seeing a lot of movement away from the enormous one time up front fee and a move towards more of a subscription based payment model.

The subscription based model just seems to make more sense for doctors since you can make the payment as you get the revenue. Plus, you can often end the subscription if the software doesn’t live up to your aspirations for an EMR. Much harder to do once you’ve sent a large one time payment to your EMR vendor.

I’m not necessarily arguing for either model. The fact is that you should do some good financial analysis to compare the subscription model over time versus the one time payment. Not a terribly hard financial analysis, but definitely worth taking the time to compare. Maybe I should put together a spreadsheet that will take care of the modeling for people.

What is certain is that the HITECH act and ARRA is dangling a bunch of money in front of doctors. However, it’s clear that doctors are going to be on their own to find the money to fund an EMR with the hope that they get some of the EHR stimulus money down the road. How they do this and how close to the edge of financial ruin they go is going to be interesting to watch.

Looks like I need to add creditors like GE Finance to the list of HITECH Act big winners.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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