Part of the economic stimulus plan has funds that are set aside to reimburse medical care facilities and doctors for money spent moving to an EHR platform. EHR provider Practice Fusion has announced that its EHR system will be made available free of charge to physicians in a partnership with BioReference Laboratories.

BioReference will feed its lab data into the Practice Fusion EHR system and recommend the product to its network of 15,000 doctors. BioReference is the nation's third largest full-service medical testing lab behind Qwest and LabCorp. The two larger labs also integrate their data into the Practice Fusion system.

"With this deal, we've gained another 15,000 physicians," says the EHR vendor's CEO Ryan Howard. That statement is a bit inflated considering that the 15,000 physicians have to choose to use the Practice Fusion system. The Practice Fusion system is a cloud-based offering that is trying to attract doctors that currently use paper billing.

The labs are keen on EHR because it saves them time and money. With EHR platforms, they only need to update one record rather than individual doctors' offices. BioReference marketing VP Amar Kamath said, "we only have to integrate the data once, not for every doctor's office."

Dell also recently announced a new EHR offering that it was offering to physicians that is a complete turnkey package physicians and facilities must purchase and share data with a provider or a local hospital. The government is enticing physicians to move to EHR systems by promising bonus payments for those who migrate.