EHR Cloud Computing on a Roll

Physician #1 – Where are you?

Physician #2 – Up in a cloud looking at the view.

Physician #1 – What's the view and why’s that ?

Physician # 2- Because here’s where HIT’s is at.

Imagined conversation between 2 physicians preoccupied with how to do deal with Health Information Technology (HIT) revolution and their health reform destinies

June 12, 2012 -   From time to time, I check my “hits,” the number of page views I receive,  to see what my readers are reading , and what’s hot and what’s not in their minds.

Here are this month’s tallies, based on a scale of 100, of the five most widely read posts.

Rank, Scale ,  Date of Entry, Title        

1.      100,  5/27/12 ,  Size Matters; Hospital Consolidation and Physicians

2.        40,  5/23/10,  Is Practice Fusion’s “Free” EHR for Real?

3.        33, 6/10/12,  Government Innovation Grants

4.        32,  12/12/11,  Frugal Health Reform Innovation

5.        32,  6/11/12,  On the Road Again to Health Reform and Repeal

As I viewed these results,  I thought: surely there’s a theme here.

There is a theme, alright.  It is this:  physicians are seeking refuge from reform pressures by gathering together with each other and with hospitals to achieve sufficient scale to deal with reform regulations and complexities,  to market their skills and products, to negotiate with government and private payers from a position of strength, and to do this as frugally as possible to survive.

Physicians are seeking frugality, which, in the case of electronic health records, resides these days in the “cloud,” in Internet browser sites outside their place of practice. If you are not familiar with cloud-computing and its impact,  I suggest you read “Can Cloud-Computing Take on the Health Care Establishment” in the June 11 edition of Forbes.

Its author, Zina Moukheirber, quotes Jonathon Bush, CEO of Athenahealth, an EHR company with $324 million in revenues. Bush says a rival company, CareCloud,  has “Such a beautiful app!”, referring to its technology.  CareCloud, a 3 year old startup, is growing like topsy and now has $8 million to $12 million in revenues.

Big hospitals and physician groups are rushing into the arms of CareCloud, an open access Internet-based system, and away from closed electronic platforms like Epic Systems.  David Blumenthal, MD, former national coordinator of HIT for the Obama administration and now chief innovation and information officer for Partners Health in Boston,  is implementing Epic at a cost of $600 million to $700 million. This is not chump change, even for the reform boys at Harvard.

Why the rush for those outside the mega-systems?  It’s fairly straightforward -  cloud computing appeals to the frugal.  Not only is cloud computing fairly simple to implement, requires a minimum of training, disrputs practice patterns less , can be accessed on site without installing new hardware, but it requires little  upfront investment and sunk costs.  It's a deal you cannot afford not looking into.  Don't le the cloud-computing opportunities roll by without at least taking a look at them.

Cloud-based EHRs companies – like Athenahealth, Eclinical Computing,  Practice Fusion, and CareCloud are on a roll these days.

Tweet: These days, cloud-computing EHR companies, Athenahealth,  Eclinical computing, Practice Fusion, and CareCloud are the rage as doctors and hospitals tool up for the electronic millennium.