Practice Fusion gets investment from Salesforce.com

August 5, 2022 - By Matthew Holt

We’ve been keeping tabs on Practice Fusion since the early days and THCB regulars will have noticed several comments and an article from CMO Robert Rowley. CEO Ryan Howard’s been hinting for a while that they were going to be getting into bed with a major software player, that shared their SaaS approach, and today they announced an investment from Salesforce.com, who we also know has been sniffing around health care too. This will include Practice Fusion becoming part of the Force.com (kind of an app store for the Salesforce.com ecosystem, although my guess is that few physicians are going there right now to look for records (not sure they’re going to Wal-mart either, though)

Practice Fusion is claiming that 19,000 users are already on its system which includes basic practice management, as well as a pretty complex EMR workflow. Coming soon will be a greater ability to share information with patients and other physicians over the platform—which allows it to spread via viral marketing. i.e. I’m referring you this patient, click here to get their data and sign up for this free EMR too. It’s not yet CCHIT certified, but Howard is aiming to be eligible for “meaningful use” money when the criteria are finally established.

I’m not too sure what SalesForce is getting other than a financial investment, as the extension from sales CRM to physician clinical workflow isn’t that obvious, but perhaps there are other behind the scenes activities going on there.

And of course the whole thing is funded by contextualized ads, which appear to the right of the screen in a similar manner to Google Adwords, but are of course targeted at a much more valuable population. Yup, with Practice Fusion we are finding out that free may just be cheap enough.