In a move that mirrors the potential integration of two healthcare IT platforms, Ringadoc has announced a marketing partnership with Practice Fusion, giving the telemedicine provider and EMR developer common ground to expand their growing businesses.
Ringadoc, which launched in 2010 at the Health 2.0 conference and rolled out its Ringadoc Exchange telemedicine platform this past January, will be marketing its services to more than 100,000 monthly active users of Practice Fusion's EMR platform. The company also announced the launch of an application programming interface (API) to help customers access after-hours messages on various tools and platforms.
"Rinagadoc and Practice Fusion are similar in that we are both cloud-based offerings that empower physicians, so this was a natural partnership. Offering Ringadoc to Practice Fusion's network makes sense because we want to reach doctors who understand that technology can enable them to better serve patients," said Ringadoc CEO and Co-Founder Jordan Michaels in a press release.
"In the past there’s been a significant void between doctor-patient communication occurring in the office during business hours compared to after-hours," added Micah Grossman, Ringadoc's product manager and co-founder, in the release. "Ringadoc has taken substantial steps to eliminating this void by capturing, logging and documenting the two-way conversations outside the office. We have gotten numerous requests from our doctors to surface this valuable data, which is the next natural step. Giving partners access to data that Ringadoc captures will help bridge that communication gap and will help provide a more comprehensive and accurate picture of where the patient is in the continuum of care."
The partnership isn't entirely new. Both are San Francisco-based, and Practice Fusion Founder and CEO Ryan Howard has been an investor in the company and helped it get on its feet. What it does, officials say, is provide an opportunity for physicians who want to expand their capabilities to serve current patients and develop service lines to attract new patients.
Founded in 2005, Practice Fusion offers a free, cloud-based EMR and practice management system for physicians, and launched a consumer-facing platform this past April. Called Patient Fusion, the platform enables consumers to find doctors and schedule appointments, as well as access medical records.
This past May, the company announced partnerships with ADP AdvancedMD, CollaborateMD and NueMD, in which the three would use Practice Fusion's API to offer web-based billing solutions to physicians and practices.
Ringadoc Exchange is designed to enable physicians to triage their own patient calls from a smartphone or other mobile device, and has handled more than 100,000 phone calls and saved physicians an estimated $500,000 in the six months that the service has been in use, officials said. As of January, the network had encompassed more than 500,000 patients and 100 providers in 20 states.
The partnership is much like one announced last August between American Well and Allscripts. At the time, American Well CEO Roy Schoenberg, MD, MPH, said deals between telehealth providers and EMR companies would increase as both parties "(recognize) that telehealth needs to become a part of the core toolset that physicians must have to practice medicine."
In an interview earlier this year, after Ringadoc closed its seed round of funding, Michaels said the company is looking to expand its cloud-based platform to give physicians and patients more opportunities to communicate outside of the traditional office setting.
"We will be building out integration options for our users to seamlessly work with other practice efficiency tools, such as EHRs, practice management software and patient portals," he said.
"We're capturing, documenting and logging two-way conversations between patients and physicians outside of the office that (are) a very important component of the entire healthcare conversation, that (were) previously left undocumented and untracked," he added. "Closing this loop for doctors' offices, as well as patients, is key to improving patient engagement, quality of care, and access."
