Practice Fusion Violates Some Physicians’ Trust in Sending Millions of Emails to Their Patients

Update: At the bottom of this post, I’ve included Patient Fusion’s response to this article. When Practice Fusion asked their users to prepare for some new “patient communication tools”, the outcry from many doctors was for Practice Fusion to stop focusing new features on patients and instead focus on unsolved physician requests that were made years previous. What I found when I started digging into Practice Fusion’s focus on patients through its launch of Patient Fusion was a much more important story where Practice Fusion’s actions were violating some physicians’ trust and might have issues with HIPAA. The story starts in early April 2012. With little fanfare (only a generic blog post about Measuring the Patient Experience Using Surveys and two mentions in the Practice Fusion “Progress Note newsletter”) (UPDATE: Practice Fusion’s response at the bottom of this post says they did communicate more than is described here.), Practice Fusion turned on a feature that would email every single patient whenever a progress note was created in the Practice Fusion EHR. The email came addressed as being sent from the doctor and asked the patient to rate and review their provider. In the 17 months since they started sending these emails, 1,844,718 reviews have been submitted across 29,630 providers according to the Patient Fusion website. If we’re really generous and assume a 20% response rate from the emails, then over th...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Technology Consultants Authors: Tags: EHR Electronic Health Record Electronic Medical Record EMR HealthCare IT HIPAA General Medical Privacy Chief Medical Officer CMO Patient Fusion Physician Ratings Physician Reviews Practice Fusion Source Type: blogs