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Electronic Health Records have been clunky, expensive, and complicated. Legislative Reform has pushed healthcare data to a tipping point. Doctors will get rewarded if they get on board and penalized if they don't.
Practice Fusion is taking advantage of this and offering an intuitive, web based, and FREE electronic health records system. This has attracted over a 1 million healthcare providers to use their system.
Although it serves ads, the money is in the data. It has released an analytics layer called Insight as of June 2013. It's origin comes from a Wellness app called 100plus that focused on small behavioral changes to improve individual health. Insight also benefits from real time and anonymized aggregated Big Data. They have a smart goal in focusing on facilitating the interaction between patients and providers on data as well as prioritizing specific disease states. They also prioritize their target audience as providers and pharmaceuticals. As with all of Practice Fusion's products, Insight has a clean and intuitive interface. One of the best features is how they co-create the features through community interaction and prioritization. They also are cross platform and have strong partnerships with public health officials. All great innovate stuff until the privacy issues came along.
Privacy concerns has plagued them before Patient Fusion has validated it. Numerous press releases are titled "Practice Fusion violates...trusts". Patient Fusion launched in April 2013 and has over 30k doctors and 1million patient reviews of the doctors. The problem is both doctors and patients did not realize these reviews will go public. The reviews included patient names and their embarrassing STDs. Practice Fusion claims that is was only a handful that have been deleted and will take measures to prevent it reoccurring. The biggest problem was in their approach of passive emails and web posts to opt-out if you don't want. Some medical privacy lawyers say that for such matters it should be an explicit opt-in messaging and there are grounds for HIPAA violation.
Is this the beginning of the end for Practice Fusion? Can they pull out of this and continue to lead the disruption of heatlhcare data? As an analyst working in the healthcare data space, I am rooting for them as they have solved so many issues that have frustrated us all on one platform.
Even if they are doomed, what can we learn from them as entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, data scientists/analysts, and healthcare interests? How do we take lessons learned and apply it? Would love to get a meaningful discussion around this.
Even if they are doomed, what can we learn from them as entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, data scientists/analysts, and healthcare interests? How do we take lessons learned and apply it? Would love to get a meaningful discussion around this.