30 percent to 50 percent less for its EMR software than its competitors charge for theirs, the CEO says.
A key factor in the firm’s growth is the ability to provide its software to healthcare providers over the Internet. The company’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications are becoming increasingly popular among doctors, in part because they don’t require physicians to invest as much in hosting the software on their own servers. Instead, eClinicalWorks has eight regional data centers around the country that support the Web-based software. And while three-fourths of the company’s total of 34,000 physician customers are using the version of its software that comes on discs and needs to be installed on their hard drives, Navani says, the rest who are using the Web-based iteration represent a significant number of SaaS users in the EMR industry.
By Navani’s calculations, his company is the largest provider of Web-based electronic medical records. (This statistic is difficult to calculate due to lack of information from the firm’s competitors.) While many major EMR providers don’t have a SaaS option for their customers, Navani says, he expects that within three years half of his company’s customers will be using its Web-based software. (Indeed, this recent post from The Health Care Blog talks about how Todd Park, the chief technology officer of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is advocating for the use of the Internet to share medical records and healthcare information.)
“I think you will see a much faster rate of growth in SaaS [EMRs] over time,” Navani says. “It’s already happening, especially as broadband is further distributed to more doctors offices.”
Yet eClinicalWorks isn’t the only EMR provider in town that is embracing the Internet. Watertown, MA-based Athenahealth (NASDAQ:[[ticker:ATHN]]) is making some inroads with its own network-based electronic medical records system. Athena, which launched the EMR in late 2007, had a comparatively few 1,270 physicians using the product as of the third quarter of 2009. But Athena recently elbowed in on one of eClinicalWorks’s big accounts, Caritas Christi Health Care. Boston-based Caritas Christi, the largest network of community hospitals in New England, said in a joint statement with Athenahealth last month that it selected
