July 23, 2010
EHR Engineers: Behind the Scenes at Practice Fusion
We often talk about our business in terms of the Practice Fusion “Community”. It’s more than just a nice phrase: with over 50,000 medical professionals registered on our system ..it really does feel like a giant village most days.
Our team of almost 50 employees here in San Francisco interacts with these various community groups on a daily basis. We’re constantly getting questions, feedback, ideas, suggestions, new business deals and reporter queries.
At the heart of this massive, whirling EHR community is our engineering team. They’re the core of our business - the group that makes everything else we do possible. They created the Electronic Health Record system and the Personal Health Record system, Patient Fusion. With incredible speed and quality, they turn the influx of new ideas into real systems that are used daily by doctors and patients.
If you’re not a Practice Fusion user yourself, you may not be familiar with just how much the engineering team here produces. We release enhancements and product features to our EHR system every 3-5 weeks. As a web-based system, each release goes live instantly across every account (usually at 2 or 3 in the morning to minimize disruption). Each release includes upwards of 30 user suggestions along with larger new functionality.
“We intensely focus on the needs of the doctor and the patient, and by doing this we are building the best health community in the world,” said Robert Ryan, Software Architect. “We all enjoy building new features for our users, but never forget how critical our system is. Every prescription dose must be conveyed perfectly to each pharmacy, and every lab result must be correctly displayed to the doctor. And with the sensitive nature of healthcare data our system must be secure. These are the things that drive us during the day and keep us up at night.”
As we get closer to Meaningful Use, the engineering team is working long hours to make sure that each of the final 25 EHR incentive criteria are ready for use. That’s they key to Practice Fusion being HHS-certified and they key to our users qualifying for $44,000 in EHR incentives.
The engineering team has some amazing new features and systems coming very soon. There’s no external engineering team at Practice Fusion; every single piece comes straight from our San Francisco tech team. And we’re in the process of hiring more engineers to add to group so we can deliver even more. If you know an enthusiastic engineer in San Francisco looking for a job - let us know!
Emily Peters
Director of Communications
Practice Fusion EMR