Practice Fusion Guarantees Meaningful Use Certification

Free Electronic Healthcare Record Publishes Detailed Roadmap
for $44,000 Qualification by 2011

SAN FRANCISCO - September 30, 2009 - Practice Fusion Inc., the fastest growing electronic health record (EHR) community for physicians in the United States, today announced a guarantee that physicians using Practice Fusion’s EHR will qualify for Meaningful Use before the economic stimulus (HITECH Act) payments begin in January 2011 – effectively guaranteeing payout of stimulus package money to the growing number of doctors using the system. As the leading free, SaaS EHR provider, Practice Fusion is uniquely positioned to meet the emerging certification guidelines and to deliver real-time updates once the final criteria are announced.

Practice Fusion has been closely tracking the development of HITECH criteria from the very start. With the assistance of staff physicians and health policy experts, the company has developed a detailed roadmap for enhancements based on the preliminary Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) "Meaningful Use" matrix. Once the certification rules are set, Practice Fusion will be able to quickly release any required enhancements across the SaaS-based user community seamlessly with no cost and no downtime. The Practice Fusion certification guarantee and plan for meeting Meaningful Use criteria are detailed online in a new certification center, launched today.

"The upcoming HHS certification rules will require significant changes to every EHR system," said Ryan Howard, CEO of Practice Fusion. "With our SaaS platform and fast set up, we are the only EHR that can get doctors up and running now, AND guarantee compliance with new criteria. Busy doctors need this kind of easy and painless way to make the switch from paper charts. Other EHR providers are offering incentives or compensation if their products don’t meet the meaningful use criteria, but doctors can’t be compensated for the time spent on a non-compliant system – and desktop software is notoriously slow and expensive to upgrade and re-install."

Practice Fusion's free EHR includes charting, eprescribing, scheduling and integration with billing systems along with free training and support. Recent partnerships with BioReference Laboratories and Quest Diagnostics, enhance the ease–of-use and utility of the software for doctors.

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About Practice Fusion
Practice Fusion addresses the complexities and critical needs of today's healthcare environments by providing a revolutionary, web-based, electronic health record (EHR) application and delivery model for physicians and patients at no cost. As a result, Practice Fusion is one of the fastest growing electronic health record communities in country. Practice Fusion has over 20,000 users in 50 states. For more information on Practice Fusion EHR, please visit practicefusion.com.

About HITECH Payments
On February 17, 2009, President Obama signed the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, as part of the stimulus package (a.k.a. American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)). The main goal of the HITECH Act is to encourage the adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) through incentive payments to physicians. According to the Act, physicians are eligible to receive up to $44,000 in total incentives per physician from Medicare starting in 2011 for “meaningful use” of a certified Electronic Health Record (EHR).

About Meaningful Use
Exactly how a physician creates reports on the Meaningful Use data elements (see the Meaningful Use matrix) has not yet been finalized – whether there is simply a declaration (subject to audit) that certain criteria have been met, or whether there will be a way of reporting actual data, is still under consideration. It is anticipated that the mechanism for reporting Meaningful Use will be finalized by the Spring of 2010.

Press Contact
Emily Peters
415.692.7179
epeters@practicefusion.com

Allison Brady, Atomic PR
212.699.3648
allison@atomicpr.com