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Software-as-a-service is one of the natural outgrowths of the dot-com boom that's been slowly infiltrating many industries, but now it's rapidly catching on. And it's coming to health care.
A story published today on the GHIT Web site tells of a company called Practice Fusion that's struck a deal with Google to provide an electronic health record for physicians as a free Web-based service. Doctors access the service through a Web browser, and that's it as far as what they have to do to use the EHR.
They'll have to put up with the ads that Google will display with the EHR, which could prove as irksome to them as those benighted popup ads are to many regular Web surfers. But hey -- FREE!!!!
SaaS is an intriguing play in health care. It's been a source of some debate in other areas simply because it has been such a departure from the way things have been done.
Traditionally, companies buy software to run their business and control everything within the borders of the enterprise. With SaaS they need buy nothing, and they usually have to maintain nothing in the way of software upgrades or hardware to run the software since that's all taken care of by the service provider.
However, the fact that it is such a departure has been a barrier to its use. It's comes across as something that's light compared to the bought software, and people have been unsure about using something they don't have close control over to conduct critical businesses.
That's changed, just in the last year. Now even financial services companies -- and you can't get any organizations more paranoid about the services they use -- are latching on to SaaS with enthusiasm.
Let's see how this plays out in health care. Practice Fusion is a startup and, even though it claims it has solid funding, most startups fail. It also has to convince physicians that the patient data they'll be putting into a central database controlled by the company will be safe and secure.
But, if the big barrier to doctors' use of EHRs is that initial upfront cost, as they say it is, then you would think that Practice Fusion's price would be attractive to them.
So this SaaS experiment -- and that's all we can say it is right now -- should catch the attention of enough early adopters to prove if it has legs. If it does then watch out, because the health care business could change in a hurry.
By Brian Robinson, GHIT Contributing Writer
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