ePrescribing Through Online AMA Platform

I was recently sent a news release about DrFirst offering their ePrescribing services to physicians through a new online American Medical Association (AMA) platform. Here’s a short description of the new AMA platform:

DrFirst is the first company to announce that it is offering its services through the new AMA online platform. The platform, which is currently in beta testing, is aimed at providing physicians access to information, products, services and resources that can facilitate medical practice and ease adoption of evolving health information technologies. The AMA aims to launch its new platform in early 2010.

I find the concept of the AMA offering a platform for doctors interesting. Does anyone else know anything about this platform? On face it just sounds like the AMA trying to get a piece of the revenue that can be generated from adopting these technologies. I’m just not sure why someone would use this new AMA portal instead of just buying the software themselves. What advantages does the AMA portal provide outside of being a recommendation source for various software?

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.

2 Comments

  • I believe there will be a special discount made to AMA members to access Rcopia through their secure web portal platform. And that electronic prescription writing will be the primary offering at the time the portal is launched, followed by other applications in the future. By offering eRx through a secure portal members will have single sign-on access to utilize many applications as they become available, without the need to log in for each individual application.

    My feeling is that this new AMA relationship is primarily a way to involve physicians who are not on the cutting edge of technology, are less sure about IT adoption and looking for guidance from a trusted source in order to increase the overall adoption of e-prescribing among mainstream providers.

    There is an interesting youtube video that talks about it more indepth at:

  • Irene,
    Thanks for the extra information. I think that this AMA portal is going to be interesting to watch. I wonder how many vendors will join the portal and then more important how many physicians will actually use this portal.

    I’m still suspicious about it being much more than being a good way to market a product. Single Sign on is interesting and nice, but seems like a small reason for doctors to want to use the portal.

    Should be interesting to watch how this all develops.

Click here to post a comment
   

Categories