An important differentiator between Practice Fusion’s Electronic Health Records (EHR) offering and other vendors is that training and support is free. It’s not only the web-based EHR that is free – as well as uploading patient demographic information from billing or whatever other source that can create a file, also done for free – but all training and support is free.
At Practice Fusion, we have come to assume this as the norm, since it has been the norm for us from the outset. But just how big of a deal this is was something I better appreciated after attending the recent HIMSS conference in Orlando.
Most EHR vendors build their business profitability based on sales. And service and support are a significant income stream to such companies. Two publicly-traded vendors (whose financials are publicly available) offer insight into the scale of this revenue. Allscripts claims that 18% of their 4th quarter revenue was from sales, 15% from professional services, 30% from maintenance, and 37% from transaction processing and other. AthenaHealth’s published financials show 2010 revenues from business services as $237 million, and $8.3 million from implementation and other. Clearly, revenues to sales-based EHR companies from fees charged for implementation, training and support are a significant portion of their income.
The free model of business, which Practice Fusion has pioneered in the health care realm (though it has been successfully used in other consumer-facing businesses – witness Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc.) change this whole dynamic. It represents a highly disruptive approach in health IT. Wide distribution is essential to success in this model, as is active usage of the product. It is not good enough for a user to simply sign on and never use it – what is key is for users to move from “dabblers” to “power users” and actively use the product. After all, more page views, more revenue.
What is needed for transition to active usage? Of course, the product itself needs to have value, needs to cover all the professional needs of the users, and needs to be so easily usable that work slow-downs are minimized (or, as we noted, work improvements are realized.
With this set of business priorities, of course offering high-quality, free training and support is a natural result. We need to remove all the barriers to adoption – and those barriers are (1) cost, and (2) usability (resulting in a work slowdown). So investing heavily in customer service and adoption-support is no real surprise. The result? Black Book Rankings listed Practice Fusion as the top-rated EHR in customer satisfaction, across many different domains. And that top-rated service is free – it really has to be.
Robert Rowley, MD
Chief Medical Officer
Practice Fusion EMR
