No such thing as a free EMR?

Mary Stevens, Editor

EMR vendor Practice Fusion has a distinction from most of its competitors: A free EMR. Practice Fusion has partnered with Good Health Media to provide an EMR system that’s supported by targeted advertising. Carefully considered and properly screened ads, claims Practice Fusion. It’s following in Google’s footsteps, and others will likely join in the trend.

As with free email, the price of an ad-based EMR could be a tradeoff that some healthcare providers are willing to make, especially those that don’t have a lot of capital floating around to sink into EMRs, regardless of possible incentive payments.

Commercial systems put email into the consumer space, and now there are plenty of “free” email brands that put ads in front of users’ eyes. And ads are not confined to free email. But this is where the email comparison ends. After all, when a commercial email system crashes, people might get annoyed, but for most of us, it’s not a life-or-death situation. As has been said ad nauseam, healthcare is different, and EMRs built on any model must be as fail-safe as possible.

If EMRs follow the same track to ubiquity and the web, vendors must screen potential advertisers with an eye toward HIPAA privacy and security considerations.

EHR deployment might never be free, but more federal dollars were announced this week to help with costs. CMS awarded federal matching funds for Medicaid programs in Hawaii, Massachusetts, North Dakota and Ohio for state planning activities necessary to implement the EHR incentive program.

HHS announced nearly $20 million in technical support assistance to help critical access and rural hospital facilities make the transition from paper to certified EHR technology. Some 1,655 critical access and rural hospitals in 41 states and the nationwide Indian Country, based in Washington, D.C., stand to benefit from this assistance, which can help each of them qualify for substantial EHR incentive payments from Medicare and Medicaid.

HIMSS 2010 Davies Award winners, announced earlier this week, included a couple of organizations with innovative EHR projects. Sentara Healthcare, a Norfolk, Va., nonprofit, integrated healthcare system that uses its eCare EHR to provide single-view access for results retrieval across all environments of care. Nemours, of Wilmington, Del., uses its EHR, NemoursOne, in combination with its data warehouse, and has developed a medication reconciliation process with an outpatient systemwide rate currently at 88 percent.

Is there such a thing as a free EMR? Tell me what you think at mstevens@trimedmedia.com.

Mary Stevens
Editor of CMIO