01-31-2012
GE Healthcare is pulling the plug on its Web-based Centricity Advance electronic health-record system for office-based physicians, the company announced.
Related Articles
In a statement posted to its website, GE Healthcare said it continually analyzes its software offerings and had found "that Centricity Advance and Centricity Practice Solution addressed many of the same customer needs for small- and medium-size practices." As a result, the company said, "(we) are consolidating our EMR to focus on our flagship EMR and PM, Centricity Practice Solution." Centricity Practice Solution is an EHR and practice-management system combination.
The small-office health information technology market has long been the Death Valley of EHR sales efforts because sales expenses to reach the one-, two-, and three-physician office practices in which a majority of office-based physicians still work have historically exceeded sales revenues. Web-based systems have long been seen as the way to penetrate this market because of their lower installation and service costs, plus the capability of the software-as-a-service platform to economically supply technical support to practices in which tech-savvy personnel are often in short supply. GE purchased Sunnyvale, Calif.,-based MedPlexus, in March 2010 to acquire just such a Web-based offering for the small-office market, which it rebranded and launched as Centricity Advance last summer.
But these advantages of a Web-based system haven't translated into market success for Centricity Advance.. There are four versions of GE's Centricity Advance on the official Certified Health IT Product List kept by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. But only three of the 920 GE Centricity installations in a recent report by the CMS and ONC listing vendors whose providers have attested to and met meaningful-use criteria under the Medicare EHR incentive program used Centricity Advance.