SAN FRANCISCO – Practice Fusion, Inc., an electronic healthcare vendor launched last August, recently announced that it will make use of Google’s AdSense program to help sponsor free electronic online health records for physicians.
It’s not unusual to have a partnership with Google for pay-per-click profit-sharing, according to Brandon McCormick, spokesperson for Google. It is, however, somewhat unique to sponsor free electronic health records for doctors with the profits, he said.
Google’s AdSense program has hundreds of thousands of Web sites and publishers and reaches 76 percent of all Internet users globally, McCormick said.
“Publishers,” such as Practice Fusion, sign up to use Google’s AdSense program online, McCormick said. Advertisers pay Google according to the number of clicks an ad receives and Google shares the proceeds with its publishers.
McCormick declined to say how much Google is paying Practice Fusion per ad, but it is “a majority of the profits.”
For the arrangement with Practice Fusion, ads are being placed on Practice Fusion’s online electronic health records, available free to doctors. When doctors use the EHRs, Google delivers ads based on key words.
“It’s an automated way of creating a sales force without having to incur any startup costs,” McCormick said.
Ryan Howard, CEO of Practice Fusion, said the use of Google’s AdSense program “is unique because we’re embedding ads within an actual product.”
The Google ads do not interfere with the privacy of patient records, Howard said. “All we transmit is a condition, a diagnosis or a treatment through CPT codes used to present ads,” he said.
Howard said Practice Fusion’s EMR model is gaining momentum because of its user-friendly format, and doctors apparently aren’t bothered by the Google ads that appear on the product. More than 600 small physician practices have signed up for the service since the beginning of the year, he said.
“Once we get [doctors] to look at a demo, it’s a done deal every time,” he said. “Doctors are consumers and Internet users. They use Google and they are used to the ads. When it comes down using our product for free, supported by Google pay-per-clicks, versus paying $50,000 for a typical health record product, it’s very compelling. The day of EMR vendors gauging doctors is coming to an end.”
According to Kim Malone, director of operations for Google AdSense, Practice Fusion’s model of linking physicians and patients together with a cost-free solution is the right step toward the improvement of healthcare nationwide.
“This will allow patients to receive a higher level of care and empower them to play a significant role in managing their health,” she said.