Practice Fusion rolls out 'mobile-first' overhaul of its EHR

The interfaces of most of the big electronic health records (EHR) systems aren’t going to win any beauty contests, and many of them have a very hard time making the jump from the desktop to mobile devices.

But health care is increasingly a mobile undertaking in both the clinic and hospital settings, and doctors want an easy and effective user experience on tablets and phones.

So Practice Fusion, which provides a cloud-based EHR for medical group doctors, says it has overhauled its EHR system — both on the front end and on the back end — to support caregivers who want to use tablet computers.

Practice Fusion CEO Ryan Howard told VentureBeat that mobile access has been the number one feature request from his company’s community of roughly 112,000 medical professionals. Howard believes the streamlined workflows in the new design will help caregivers do their jobs faster — both on the desktop and on mobile devices.

You can check out the look and feel of the new EHR in this video provided by the company:

The new EHR, Practice Fusion says, is optimized to work on Apple iPads, the iPad mini, and a variety of Android tablets.

“Unlike our competitors who struggle to make a dated, legacy product work on a mobile device, we decided to build our industry-leading EHR from the ground up to deliver the best experience for our users,” Howard said in a statement.

Practice Fusion’s Ryan Howard will be one of the 61 speakers at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference,
October 27-28 in San Francisco. There are still a few tickets left if you’d like to attend.

“Beyond delivering the best looking and best responding cloud-based EHR on the market, with this new product we are now equipped to work even better with larger practices and enterprise partners,” Howard said.

Howard said Practice Fusion worked with well-known San Francisco-based design firm Cooper on the initial design of the new EHR, then turned to its internal designers to take the project the rest of the way.

The EHR leverages technologies like Bootstrap, HTML5, jQuery, D3.js, and Ember.js, Howard said, and is supported by back-end technologies like Microsoft .Net, and Amazon S3.

Howard said his team is now hard at work further optimizing its EHR for use on even smaller devices — the iPhone 6 Plus, for example.