I was recently told by Alicia that Practicom had merged with another company and would no longer offer the Lite/Premium model for physicians offices. In this model,which was what AC originally hinted at in a newsletter some time ago, patients pay $60/year for full access to the capabilities of the PHR, but there is a Lite version that is free. With the Lite version, they can receive messages from the office, but not send messages to the office.
I inquired as to specifics concerning what items from the CCD was automatically uploaded into Practicom. In the response, Alicia declined to give me any of the information I asked for, but said that they would only offer the new pricing whereby the physician's office pays $1000/year and all patients are premium. I'm not trying to increase our expenses.
What I found interesting concerning my exchanges with Practicom's staff was why they wanted the physician's offices to pay these fees. I was told that the physician's offices were not able to sufficiently get patients to switch from Lite to Premium. Well, this implies that either they weren't attempting to commuicate tothe patients why they should, or that the patients in these practices didn't value the service. Let's think about that second part.
If the patients do not feel that the value of having this information available to them is worth a modest annual fee, why should the physician pay a high fee to provide it to them anyway? I cannot see a PCP, with the low reimbursements already being pushed at them, paying $1000/year to provide the patients with a service they do not value. After all, you can say you value it, but you don't really value it unless you will pay something for it.
I asked for details about what information and capabilities the patient actually gets so that I could discuss the offering with some of our key patients to help me determine if our patient population would value the service. If they valued it, I'm sure we would have had a couple of hundred conversions over the next year or so. I think one of the doctors on this board said that his patients tended to convert. And if they told me "No, Wayne I don't think this is worth it" then I would see no purpose in paying to give it to them anyway.
Guess I'll never know now.
