Health records want to be free. At least that’s what PracticeFusion, a two-year-old company that makes SaaS electronic health records (EHRs) and practice management software thinks. Never mind that people might be scared to put their health records on the internets, PracticeFusion’s hypothesis was that doing a deal with Google to put ad words on medical records would allow the company to offer its product free to physicians, who were not adopting EHRs because they couldn’t afford the investment of time, money and support.
Fast forward a couple of years, during which EHRs have still not been widely adopted (about 17% of doctors have them, most of the market leading products really suck, and docs say EHRs actually slow them down) and stimulus money has come into the picture to incentivize physicians to automate.
Marc Benioff, the king of Saas, has decided somehow health care will be a market for him, and has invested an undisclosed amount of money in PracticeFusion. According to the press release, the patient health record will launch on Force.com, Salesforce’s enterprise model. This makes sense, because of HIPAA compliance, secure servers, etc.
The press release also announces this as a “cloud computing initiative.”
Oy, the buzz words have changed mightily in the last two years. But what will the doctors do now? Except for the free part, nothing has changed.
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Test request from your Twitter account. Let me know if you need anything else. Chris.