What do you get when you combine a medical education company with an EHR vendor?

That’s not a trick question, and we doubt there’s any one answer, but it’s a question that intriguingly comes to mind with the announcement that Pri-Med, which provides professional medical education to a community of more than 260,000 clinicians, has purchased Amazing Charts, which provides EHRs to independent medical practices.

Acting an independent operating subsidiary of Pri-Med, Amazing Charts will continue to offer its software solutions to clinicians, but now will have the resources to accelerate product development and the geographic reach of Pri-Med’s medical education conferences in 30 cities nationwide.

As Jonathan Bertman, MD, founder and president of Amazing Charts, described it in a release accompanying the announcement, “Given the vast amount of knowledge and the pace at which practice recommendations change, providing real-time feedback to clinicians based on their current practice styles is critical. While other EHR vendors may try to find ways to sell EHR data to the highest bidder, we believe any use of this data must be ethical, with clear and consistent disclosure, and used to improve patient outcomes rather than allow advertisers to better target consumers.”

But the more intriguing assessment of the arrangement came from John Mooney, Pri-Med’s founder and CEO.

"The holy grail of medical education,” he said, “is to demonstrate improved patient outcomes as a result of access to unbiased, evidence-based CME. We believe that in addition to our live meetings and online CME courses, providing this education at the point of care is the obvious next step, and we are excited to develop this with Amazing Charts.  With this deeply integrated partnership, we are together reimagining the EHR as a real-time educational instrument that expands well beyond managing one’s practice.”

With Amazing Charts, Pri-Med gains a next-generation medical education platform strategically located at the point of patient care, enabling it to deliver CME activities where and when decision support is needed.

More information can be found here.