markleeds wrote on Sunday, February 10, 2008:
I went to Pri-Med for the first time this year. I usually skip it because it has always fallen on the same weekend as the FOMA conference.
There is a huge floor of vendors advertising a wide variety of products. Most visible, of course, are the pharmaceutical companies. There were many EMR vendors. I walked around a little each day and kept discovering more of them. I sat for a few demonstrations, but after a while, they take so long and are so unimpressive, I couldn’t take anymore, so I just looked over the shoulders of other ‘victims’ and grabbed a free pamphlet and ran to the next booth.
On the surface, many of them are impressive due to the sophisticated colorful interfaces. Some have color diagrams that you can draw on. Some are web-based and others look like they were probably written in Visual Basic.
When you really look at the functionality and how easy and fast you can enter and retrieve good data, I didn’t see anything that I would want over OpenEMR, even if cost were not an issue.
Some programs were web-based and available as a subscription. The cost is typically around $400/month. This includes regular updates.
I was told that there are 700 EMR vendors.