Many of you that I saw at HIMSS were aware that I participated in a Free HD TV Giveaway contest with fellow blogger: Dr. Joseph Kim. The giveaway was sponsored by Free EHR vendor Practice Fusion.
I’m really happy to say that @WesBates picture with me won him a 42″ HD TV and thanks in large part to those who attended the New Media Meetup I was able to beat out Dr. Kim as well. I just got the TV yesterday and it’s awesome. Thanks Practice Fusion!
It was pretty interesting wearing a Practice Fusion shirt around the HIMSS exhibit hall. Many of the people that I talked to asked about the shirt. However, I was a bit surprised that I didn’t get more people riping the Free EHR business model. Instead, it seemed like most people were familiar with it.
The 3 questions I did get asked the most about Practice Fusion was about their long term viability, how they make money offering a Free EHR, and whether a Free EHR is as good as the other EHR that you pay a lot of money to get. I asked Emily from Practice Fusion these questions and here were her responses:
1. Viability – We had 500% user growth in 2010 and doubled our team. The company has been very successful in attracting advertisers, partners (Dell, DeVry, Microsoft) and investors. We have 70,000 users serving 8 million patients today. And we bring on 300 more each day (compared to AthenaHealth brining on 600 docs in Q4). There’s a lot of strength in our numbers. Happy to answer any specific questions here.
2. How does Practice Fusion make money – Our favorite question! Practice Fusion is ad-supported, just like the radio, Gmail and EMR & HIPAA. Our discrete advertising allows the EHR to be available entirely free for any doctor in the US.
3. Quality – We were so honored when Black Book Rankings announced we were voted #1 EHR for 2011 primary care in January. Practice Fusion was up against EHRs that cost tens of thousands and still came away with the most #1 awards for categories including reliability, support, best-of-breed technology and delivery excellence. Forget “you get what you pay for” – that report proved that a free EHR could definitely be the best EHR.
To expand on all three of these: one thing that’s core to Practice Fusion is our alignment with our users. Since we’re an ad-supported product, we only succeed if doctors actually use the product. Our focus is on support, training and continuous product enhancement because of this. You saw it yourself when we completely re-did the getting started process inside the EHR over the end of the year. Keeping our users happy is fundamental to our growth. It seems simple, but surprising rare in the health IT sector.
It was fun to take pictures with so many cool people. Unfortunately, I did a poor job of keeping track of all the pictures. However, here’s a few of them that I did get to give you a flavor for the cool people I met:
EMRandHIPAA.com’s HIMSS11 coverage is sponsored by Practice Fusion, provider of the free, web-based Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system used by over 70,000 healthcare providers in the US.
Re: how Practice Fusion and other free EMRs make money…if it’s not the case already, it is extremely likely that they get data rights in their contracting and will eventually compile very rich databases to sell to 3rd parties (prescribing patterns, disease patterns, that sort of thing).
If not, they’re missing an opportunity that many similar freeware EMRs are banking on.
Ad sales can only get you so far; I’m sure PF has a long term revenue plan that goes beyond banner ads.
Congratulations John! Hope you enjoy your new TV!
Congrats John, yes as you shared HIMSS photos, do share the new TV photo also !!
Jackie,
I’m sure that’s on their radar. They’d be crazy to not be considering that also.
Michael West,
I will!
Naga,
I was going to, and then my wife somehow convinced me to wait to open it since in the next couple days we’re moving into a new house that we just purchased (assuming we can sign enough paperwork for them to give it to us. So, I’ll see if I can get one in my new home.