Practice Fusion CEO Ryan Howard has 200,000 reasons why you should want to have your doctor keep your medical records online. Two hundred thousand is how many people Howard says die every year because their medical history wasn’t available to an attending physician.
Practice Fusion is an online medical record platform service for doctors. Subscribing physicians make it easy for patients to pass along their health records to new doctors in a reliable simple manner. Rather than having physical records forwarded from one or more prior doctors, Practice Fusion clients can call up history immediately, saving time and aiding in the diagnostic process.
“America’s Doctor” Mehmet Oz is a fan. He says having an accurate record of a patient’s history is invaluable information when trying to make a diagnosis or prescribing treatment. For patients, Oz says, letting your doctor put your information online is a no brainer.
“You’re much better off having multiple smart eyes looking at your records and trying to figure out what’s going on than hiding in this little cave where most of us dwell where we don’t share our records and we don’t get the best care available to us for that reason,” Dr. Oz says in the attached video.
As with all things on the Internet, privacy is a major concern. Howard says Practice Fusion uses “military grade encryption” on par with what you’d find at a major financial institution to keep patient information safe.
Howard also makes the point that the risk of your health information being hacked from Practice Fusion or other electronic medial record (EMR) companies is likely less than alternative systems. Physical files can be forgotten, lost, ruined in a fire or lack complete information as patients go from doctor to doctor throughout their lives.
Practice Fusion has a sister product called Patient Fusion that allows individuals to have their own records available from any online device. For example says Howard, “if you go on a ski trip and you fall and you hurt yourself you have that data available on your phone in real time to show to any doctor whether they’re in or outside your ecosystem.”
The next time you visit the doctor ask him or her if they’re part of a EMR system or platform. It could be a matter of life and death.
