Robert Scoble, one of the most prominent evangelists for internet technology and web services, interviews Ryan Howard, CEO of PracticeFusion for a recent blog post. Ryan talks about the impact that their Software as a Service (SaaS) Electronic Medical Record (EMR) solution has had on the market and how their advertising based revenue model has allowed them expand quickly in a market dominated by companies charging tens of thousands of dollars for installations of their EMR systems. It is also the only system that we have heard of programmed in Adobe Flex meaning it can be used on all the major operating systems.
There are also some very interesting comments posted on Scoble’s blog about this video.
Free EMR services will surely help to imrpove the currently anemic adoption rates by physicians, now between 4 - 13%, and we may see a number of competing systems switching to some of the same business models that PracticeFusion has taken. In the long-term perhaps we could even see more adoption of open source models such as the OpenEMR project.
