PracticeFusion Unveils Free EHR

Here's a piece of news that may (or may not) strike physicians as the answer to their EHR adoption woes.  San Francisco-based PracticeFusion has announced a hosted solution that CEO Ryan Howard touts as "community-based" - oh yeah, and it's free!  During a recent conversation with Mr. Howard, he talked at length about the slick, intuitive user interface, the intensive client services, and the high-level of interoperability doctors will enjoy with the PracticeFusion model.  After a half-hour conversation - during which I was impressed with both the CEO and the company - I asked, "What do you see as the one stumbling block that concerns you about the viability of your business model?"  There's always one.  Otherwise, there would be no risk, right?  To that, Mr. Howard spoke vaguely and didn't address the question in any concrete way - he had explained during our talk that there were certain things he couldn't discuss at that point and though it wasn't clear at the time, I now see why he didn't answer my question in a more straightforward fashion - because the biggest hurdle to PracticeFusion's success is the one thing he couldn't talk about.

You see, the catch is that the project will be subsidized by the "[sale] of de-identified data to insurance groups, clinical researchers, and pharmaceutical companies."  So the obvious question is, will the healthcare community buy into the model?  Do you, as a physician, have the confidence to explain to your patients that the de-identified data your EHR vendor is selling can never be traced to them or used against them in any way?  Do you, as a patient, feel comfortable with that?  Mr. Howard's answer, "Every healthcare vendor is selling data.  Everyone has this data, but we'll have more of it and it will be real-time and aggregated.  We will be able to help drive the patient community toward better care by providing data on the causes and trends of certain conditions over time."  And the reality is, this is one of the biggest reasons these players (Pharma, Insurance, Gov't.) have been pushing for universal EHR - they want access to comprehensive, inexpensive (compared to gathering it for themselves) medical data for research and development.  De-identifying and using patient data is already a major push in the industry, it was going to happen eventually, PracticeFusion just seems to be the first to figure it out.

We'd love to hear more from everyone out there on this, though.  Would you be comfortable if your doctor was on PracticeFusion?  If you're a doctor, would you feel confident letting your patients know what you're doing?  Let us know.

UPDATE: Rick Brady at Healthcare IT weighs in with this opinion on PracticeFusion's announcement:

Why this matters: You can not truly anonymize healthcare data. The implication is that the health data gathered could (and probably would) be correlated with the other data you have at places like ChoicePoint, resulting in even less individual privacy.

Comments

[John Kaphal]

Practice Fusion offers an elegant, easy to implement and easy to use second generation Electronic Health Records application. I recommend it highly.

[MARY EVANS]

I WOULD LIKE TO VIEW THE ELECTRONIC HEALTH
RECORDS YOU ARE PREVIEWING. THANKS, MARY