Practice Fusion Integration

kylenave wrote on Thursday, October 22, 2015:

I have a provider that would like to switch from some online EMR with terrible support to Practice Fusion. I have not been successful in pitching OpenEMR (yet).

If he decides to go with Practice Fusion, it has no billing functions so I would ideally like to integrate OpenEMR with Practice Fusion and do billing through OpenEMR. I understand PF can export HL7 files but can OpenEMR import them and is that even the right file to do what I want.

Just trying to figure out if I’m barking up the wrong tree or not…

Thanks for any insights from the more knowledgeable.

teryhill wrote on Thursday, October 22, 2015:

You can use Mirth and use it to send and receive HL7

Terry

fsgl wrote on Thursday, October 22, 2015:

Ill-advised choice:

  1. Data a practice generates is not owned by the practice but by PF.
  2. If company goes belly up, no way of knowing how PHI will be protected. How would users know that their patient data will be kept “anonymized” at such time of crisis?
  3. Exit penalty is very steep. Note that Stephen’s link detailing the high price of dumping PF has been removed from their website. I would do the same if users of my company’s EHR posted such negative comments. Easy to get in, very difficult to get out.

If client wants “free”, open source applications are better choices.

If he sorta wants OpenEMR, best not to fool around with mongrels. A well built Demo may seal the deal.

juggernautsei wrote on Thursday, October 22, 2015:

Practice Fusion does have billing capabilites. It is not apart of the free service. I know billers that manually copy the information from practice fusion into their billing software (don’t want to give a plug for some other vendor) and complete the billing that way.

Try showing the face lift that Robert Down is working on. It sold a client for me.

fsgl wrote on Friday, October 23, 2015:

A little digging shows that the user forum, referenced in Stephen’s link & that in the link in the third paragraph, has been replaced by the “help forum”/Knowledge Base. User posts have totally vanished, only PF sanctioned material remains.

This is the current webpage. Rather pathetic to be reduced to begging for 1 .csv file (Demographics) & the balance as .pdf files on your own patients.

The question of ownership of patient data is critical as illustrated by this article. It’s bad enough to have to put with advertisements while entering a clinical note, but PF’s end run around physicians should shout volumes about the ethos ( or the lack thereof) of their business model.

The article also calls into question PF’s assurances that patient records are “anonymized”. Seems that they had no difficulty emailing these anonymous patients.

A more basic & fundamental problem concerns physicians’ HIPAA liability in placing PHI on the PF servers without explicit patient consent before doing so. If physicians did not read the User Agreement section granting PF permission to email patients, it is not likely patient consent had been obtained prior to signing up with PF. That company may understand the letter of HIPAA but certainly not the spirit of the law.

No rational reason to accept such a Faustian bargain.

kylenave wrote on Friday, October 23, 2015:

Thanks for comments so far. It looks like my approach won’t work because while they can export data, they seem to be only doing it for partner companies.

The most likely outcome here is we will use one of the billing partner companies and they will use PF however I’ll continue to push for OpenEMR.

I’ll search for “Robert Down” and the facelift for more information but if anyone has pointers to up to date info they want to share, let me know.

Thanks.

fsgl wrote on Friday, October 23, 2015:

Look here.