With the news of Mitochon shutting down their Free EHR business, that really only leaves a couple players left in the Free EHR space. The largest one is Practice Fusion, but it has challenges of its own. You might remember the announcement that Kareo bought the Epocrates EHR and is offering the EHR for free.
You could tell that Practice Fusion was put in a bad position when Kareo decided to basically part ways and offer a competitive product to Practice Fusion. Although, no doubt Practice Fusion and Kareo both knew it was going to happen sooner or later. The key question was how Practice Fusion was going to respond to the move by Kareo since Practice Fusion was sorely lacking in the billing department.
Well, the answer is now in. Practice Fusion just announced 3 preferred billing partners: NueMD, CollaborateMD and ADP AdvancedMD. You can see NueMD’s press release about the partnership here. Both NueMD and CollaborateMD are offering their billing solution starting at $149/month. ADP AdvancedMD offers “customized pricing” which means they don’t want to commit to a price and likely change the price based on the size of the practice.
The Practice Fusion announcement I got did say that these integrations will happen “later this summer.”
It’s an interesting choice on Practice Fusion’s part to continue down the integration road versus developing their own billing software or just buying one of the billing software that’s out there. I wonder if this is going to pose a long term problem for them. I wonder if Practice Fusion learned from the Kareo experience and the contracts with NueMD, CollaborateMD, and ADP AdvancedMD take this into account.
No doubt Practice Fusion comes at the EHR world with a different business model in mind, but it could be a mistake for them to not also have a hand in the purse strings (billing). Sure, they’ll get some short term financial bump from these three partnerships, but are they trading revenue for long term connections with the doctors?
Look at Google, Facebooks and other free services, it is always at the cost of your personal information; why should this surprise after all? http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/10/24/practice-fusion-reviews-whoops/