WebMD growth

[MHDoc]

I read some place WebMD's Practice Manager is used by 1/3 of all small practices, and >185,000 physicians, does this mean they may eventually dominate the EMR, and practice Mx market?
MH

[mel]

They had an angry lot of physicians with HIPAA issues :mad:

[hirschr]

I think that refers to Medical Manager billing/scheduling software, and Medical Manager is a far cry from an EMR. In fact for most shoppers, their experience with Medical Manager makes them look elsewhere for an EMR. My demo was the worst one I've had- I had to show the salesman what to click!

[mwarddoc]

I looked at it and was not impressed, particularly with the cost factored in to the capabilities. It does integrate with their billing and scheduling software, but the cost was just silly. They do have sales people though, and market fairly steadily.

They are the leading provider in my area, but everyone that I know who uses them has paper and electronic charts. A two doctor group that started 2 years before I did keeps paper charts with all correspondence, etc. Their staff enter lab data into the EMR, time consuming, and they do OCR for all letters to get them in and they invested nearly 50K for this, for software alone. They have a full time person scanning and OCR'ing. My office with Soapware is completely paperless, after scanning images into chart, and at a small fraction of the cost. I don't know if Soapware is better, wouldn't be able to tell without using both systems live, but it was one hell of a lot less expensive. For me, the quote was nearly 25K for software alone for the PMSI product.

[d11aad38d]

Without regards to any product, can anyone imagine investing $$ in anything touted, sold, demo'd, and promised by a sales person? EMR's are in need of physician definition, i.e., what do you want to enter into a data repository? No matter what the product, until we define that single list, the EMRs are all the same -- just ask any sales person which other EMRs he/she sold before joining their present company. d11

[mel]

There are efforts to standardize EMR components, long overdue if you ask me.
Anyone thinking of investing in an EMR needs to watch the horizon, issues such as the CCR is being touted as one of the future must haves.
Mel

[Surgeon]

I have no paper charts with Chartlogic, voice recognition that requires no transcription, although my nursing data and preliminary stuff has to be hand entered. Photo's and labs can be scanned(rough on memory) but anything that can be saved on a disk or emailed can be cut and pasted. I am worried though because Meditech has such a big piece of the hospital market they may end up being the Microsoft of EMR, many better products biting the big one due to ubiquitousness.