Business Model Innovation in the EHR Industry: Vendors Offer Loans & Guarantees

Sarai Tsai | January 22, 2010

Sometimes you need to borrow money to make money.  Now physicians facing high costs to implement electronic health records (EHR) can borrow funds directly from the vendors.  Allscripts, Ingenix, IBM, Cardinal Health, Practice Fusion, and other EHR vendors have announced loan programs for EHR clients.  [Update:  Practice Fusion's business model is based on a free EHR product, and they offer a  HHS certification guarantee.]  While borrowing money from a vendor may not appear immediately attractive, Allscripts and Ingenix, along with a few others, also offer a guarantee policy that their EHR product will enable physicians to qualify for Medicare reimbursements under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) by meeting the “meaningful use” criteria.

This is even better than buying a car.  Not only do you get a loan, you’re guaranteed to benefit from it.  If not, while you can’t return it, like Hyundai’s Assurance program, you might get to use it for free. It’s worth shopping around for the best deal for you – Allscripts offers various financing plans from its preferred banking partners, while Ingenix has interest-free loans to qualifying primary care physician offices with 10 or fewer doctors.  Derisked, with less upfront costs!  We wonder if this business model innovation is going to be what finally tips many physicians over to joining the EHR community.

Source: Healthcare IT News

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5 Responses to “Business Model Innovation in the EHR Industry: Vendors Offer Loans & Guarantees”

  1. Brian McCarthy Says:
    January 23rd, 2010 at 6:21 am

    As an Allscripts certified partner in Flordia we are seeing 3x the activity now then prior to the new programs from Allscripts. Between their “simply to use interface”, new financing and Meaningful Use guarantee we are seeing Doctors call us to get more information. As they say “2010 is the Year of EHR”.

  2. pharmacy technician Says:
    January 24th, 2010 at 12:04 am

    Keep posting stuff like this i really like it

  3. Glenn Laffel, MD, PhD Says:
    January 25th, 2010 at 3:05 pm

    The subject of this post is timely, but the post does contain some inaccurate statements and fails to mention some key facts. I posted a piece on this very subject just today, which can be found here:

    http://tinyurl.com/yk9rvre

    I’d urge folks who find the subject to be of interest to check it out.

    Thank you,
    Glenn Laffel MD, PhD
    Sr VP Clinical Affairs
    Practice Fusion
    http://www.practicefusion.com
    Free, Web-based EHR

  4. Emily Says:
    January 25th, 2010 at 7:43 pm

    Good post – but one correction, if you would. Practice Fusion doesn’t offer a loan to our users. Our EHR system is entirely free, so there isn’t anything for a doctor to borrow.

    Practice Fusion does offer a HHS certification guarantee – detailed here http://practicefusion.com/pages/certification_center.html – which is why we were included in the Healthcare IT News piece.

  5. Sarai Tsai Says:
    January 25th, 2010 at 10:23 pm

    Thanks a lot, Glenn and Emily from Practice Fusion, for catching my oversight. I enjoyed your post, Glenn, detailing the other guarantee programs and would encourage people who read this post to check it out. I’m sure this is just the beginning of a variety of experimental business models to encourage EMR adoption.

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