Practice Fusion Case Study

Luke’s House is a small primary care clinic that provides free, basic services to patients without a primary care provider. Most of the clinic’s patients are people who would otherwise have gone to the ER or not received care at all. The mission of Luke’s House is “to be a place of medical and spiritual hope, health and healing for the people of Greater New Orleans, to provide patient centered experiences for students, and to open a doorway to long-term healthcare solutions.” The clinic is in a low-income part of town and has highly limited resources. Adam Bradley, the executive director, is the only full-time staff at Luke’s House. All other physicians, interpreters, nurses, students, and staff are volunteers. A complication of this is that
The first failure was mostly due to a lack of ownership/commitment from the clinic’s medical director. The medical director “got busy” and “left [the clinic] hanging.” The second failure was due to lack of physician buy-in. Practice Fusion requires physicians to provide their credit score and recent purchase history in order to verify their identity, which many physicians were unwilling to provide. Bradley has since spoken with Practice Fusion and Experian, the credit company that facilitates the identification process, and found that Experian’s verification process is completely separate, secure, and inaccessible to Practice Fusion. Bradley has presented this information to the clinicians and has established enough buy-in to proceed with the EHR installation and
As the EHR is free, it is supported through the use of advertisements and sales of patient health information. Albeit, the advertisements are not of the “pop-up” fashion and are geared towards the marketing of pharmaceuticals. Practice Fusion also collects health information that is inputted into the system and removes all identifying characteristics, such as names, addresses, social security numbers, and dates of birth. This now “de-identified” information is then sold to third-party medical researchers and health professionals for “clinical research and to support public health