No. 1 EHR vendor Practice Fusion closes $23M

The company is backed by Peter Thiel and Founders Fund

Electronic health records company Practice Fusion has already received the much coveted Thiel-stamp-of-approval (which, these days, is like gold), so it makes sense that the company has since gone on to make big bucks. Practice Fusion on Tuesday announced that it's raised a $23 million Series B round led by Founders Fund, with help from Artis Capital Management and Glynn Capital Management, as well as existing investors Morgenthaler Ventures and Felicis Ventures. The new funds bring the company's total raised to $30 million.

"For the last three years we've been heads-down, focused on product development, user experience and supporting our doctors in making the digital switch," said Practice Fusion CEO Ryan Howard via email. "This round of funding will allow us to continue this critical work while purposefully scaling our company through new hires, additional infrastructure and further developing our ad-supported monetization strategy."

Since Obama's mandate that all medical practices switch over to electronic health records, Practice Fusion has positioned itself to be the go-to resource for the 80% of doctors who practice in groups of nine or fewer, who simply can't afford to implement an electronic health record system on site. These days only 10% of doctors have electronic health records, but as the average doctor makes $120,000 a year, that doesn't leave a lot of room for paying an IT person to manage the health record system. 

"Encryption and a fortune 500 data center would cost them $250,000 to implement themselves on site in their own office," said Ryan Howard in a recent phone conversation. "This gives them perspective and makes them realize they could never host the system on their own."

Enter Practice Fusion. At the time of Practice Fusion's launch in 2007, 95% of doctors were still using paper charts. But "free" is always attractive. The company offers doctors a turnkey solution that is 100% cloud-based and completely free, and the medical community is flocking to it. The company's revenue grew 400% in 2010 and the user base of doctors increased 500%, according to Ryan Howard. Practice Fusion's database holds some eight million patient records and serves 60,000 patients per day who wish to access their health records. 

In January, the company was named the number one EHR vendor in an independent survey of 30,000 ambulatory medical providers, receiving top billing across 18 categories, including overall performance, breadth of offerings and delivery excellence, reliability, and breed technology.

More than 75,000 medical professionals have joined Practice Fusion's network and 350 new professionals join each day. 

"Practice Fusion advances our health and well-being by bringing the benefits of information technology to medicine: it connects patients to doctors and real-time data, creating life-saving applications that are a total departure from the dominant, often archaic, healthcare paradigm," said Peter Thiel, managing partner at Founders Fund, in a prepared statement. "Practice Fusion represents the future of medicine: healthcare married to the efficiency of information technology."