Many of you know I’m all about keeping things simple, effective and useful. It’s better to have something simple that does a killer job at what it does than to have something so complex that no one uses it. In fact, that’s really the basis of my simple plan for meaningful use. Of course, this can often be confused as not valuing other items. However, that’s just not the case. You just start with reasonable goals and do amazing things with it. Then, you expand once you’ve conquered something simple, but I digress. The point is that I really enjoy seeing simple systems that just flat out work.

That’s why I was intrigued by an email I received from a reader about their system called ePatientHistory. I think it can best be described as a simple patient portal that tries to do 2 things really well: online patient registration and online patient payments.

I should make a disclaimer that I haven’t used this service other than the demos on their website. However, I really like some of the concepts and I wish more EMR companies would try to create something simple and effective that focus on small goals as opposed to trying to cure the whole world with a patient portal that is so complex no one uses it (man I’m in a ranting mood today). Let’s talk about each function which they call ePatientHistory and ePatientPayments.

ePatientHistory – Online Patient Registration
I tested the demo for this and it was a little buggy and not as intuitive as I would have liked it to be. For example, it didn’t have the standard * next to all the required fields and the pop up that was shown for the required fields didn’t make much since to me. A small thing that makes a big difference. Maybe this just wasn’t shown in the demo, but it would have been nice to had nested questions that were only shown if I’m female for example. That way I can skip the pap smear questions and go straight to the testicular self exam ones.

Also, it was awkward to have to register and then choose the form I want to fill out. Ideally the doctors office could just send me an email that has basically registered me into the system. The email would include a link which I click and get taken to a step by step webpage of what the doctor’s office wants me to do for my appointment. Then, I can’t screw it up as a patient. After I’ve filled out the important paperwork, then let me see the full login and the other features that I may want to use.

Of course, when you’re dealing with a standalone portal like this, the question really is how are you going to get the information out of the system. This system seems to offer a CSV file which can then be imported into an EMR. Ideally, I’d like this company to show me a list of EMR companies that support this type of import. I know that all of them could since CSV is pretty standard, but how many would and if they do would that data be inserted into your EMR in a useful way? Of course, many might just want the health history form to be a nice PDF file that they can upload to their EMR. However, it’s just sad to lose all that data in a PDF file.

The cost structure for this service is interesting. Basically it’s $695 up front and $39.95 per month for hosting. Seems a little pricey to me, but if they can make sales that’s a really good business model to have. You get the up front money and a residual income.

ePatientPayments – Online Patient Payment
This is an interesting module since it’s basic idea is to collect payments. Although, one good part of this system is that it will collect payments over time according to a payment plan. I think this can be really useful in collecting harder to collect accounts. Plus, it can be scheduled to be done automatically thanks to the power of Paypal.

Similar to the other description above, I’m not sure how the patient will know how much to pay. I didn’t see anywhere in the admin that seemed like a place that someone in a clinic could notify someone that they have a bill to pay and come to this portal to pay it. That would be nice functionality. Although, it would be really sweet functionality if it was tied to the EMR where the actual charges arrive. Of course, this is the challenge of using a system that’s not connected to your EMR.

The cost for this is similar to the other one with $395-495 a month up front and then $29.95 per month for hosting. One thing it doesn’t say is how the charges that Paypal charges will be handled. I’m guessing they pass those on to you the end user as well. Paypal is an amazing platform and great for developers since it costs nothing to get started and use it. However, Paypal instead gets paid on the back end with the highest percentage fees of any other credit card processor. I imagine ePatientPayments will want to switch to something other than Paypal as they grow. The savings of using another credit card processor over PayPal will basically pay for the ePatientPayments and then some.

Conclusion
I think we’re going to see a lot more little services like this pop up. I think a number of them could be very beneficial if they’re integrated or used alongside a great EMR. The other good part is that it seems like using stand alone services like this one will still allow you to be considered a “certified EHR” and possibly receive some of the $36 billion of EMR stimulus money.

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I’ve been following the Google Health announcements for quite a while now and today Google Health finally went live.

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.

Recently I’ve been reading a fair amount about the movement that many are calling Health 2.0. I think the most simple description of Health 2.0 is applying many of the Web 2.0 concepts to health care. My question is whether EMR fits into Health 2.0. My personal feeling is that most of them don’t. Most Web 2.0 projects are consumer facing projects that allow people to interact, collaborate and participate in the process. EMR software is more about facilitating a doctor’s charting.

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’ve been looking through my statistics lately (which I actually do most days) and it seems like most people aren’t searching for EMR anymore. It seems like there is a shift going on in people’s minds that they are now starting to search for EHR as opposed to EMR. There’s a whole discussion on wikipedia about whether the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) and Electronic Health Record (EHR) articles should be merged.

In my book they are pretty much the same in most people’s minds. Sure, some people like to argue that EHR has features that reach out to patients and allow patients to enter medical data, but most EMRs have those type of features anyway. I prefer to look at it as an EMR with a patient portal. However, the in thing to do seems to be to call a company’s EMR an EHR. The fact is that most people that have an EMR have a number of patient facing portions of their EMR. Does that make them all an EHR?

Regardless, I’m just wondering if one day I’m going to need to rename my blog to EHR and HIPAA. I’ve kind of grown fond of EMR and HIPAA, but I’m definitely not oblivious to the fact that people are starting to seach for EHR and not EMR. Renaming my blog might be a great thing to help with getting better google searches on the subject. Yes, I do enjoy having a lot of traffic to my blog. It makes me happy to think that people read my stuff and that I’m participating in at least some small way to shape the evolution of EMRs EHRs.