It's the age-old "give them a taste and they'll buy" routine. RemedyMD, a Sandy, UT.-based electronic health records vendor, has agreed to give ambulatory practice physicians' offices a free license for its medical records and practice management software.
The company says its main motive in offering the free licenses is to increase the number of practices that go electronic with their medical data. However, it's looking for the up-sell. If physicians want technical support, ad-hoc reporting capabilities or high-level analytics they'll have to pay. Having seen open-source software vendors succeed tremendously with a similar model, I'm inclined to think this will work, even though RemedyMD isn't opening up its code base.
Ultimately, the company wants physicians to use "predictive informatics," an approach which combines EMR data and genomic data to track outcomes from each intervention to determine its effectiveness.
To learn more about the release:
- read this Healthcare IT News item
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