Acermed blames lawsuit for company failure

Acermed, a leading seller of Electronic Medical Record (EMR) software to hospitals, whose product was certified by the CCHIT standards body, is dead.

The company sent out a fax yesterday, reproduced at GPL Medicine, notifying customers that the Irvine, Calif. company had ceased operations.

In an interview with EMR Update, Acermed president Richard Yonis blamed a lawsuit from  Medinformatix for the failure. He said the illness of the company's CTO hurt its ability to gain new funding, and that he felt the company's legal case was solid.

Yonis also insisted the company had operated completely honestly, that it would try to support customers over the next few months, and he expressed the hope that rights to the technology would go to a strong firm which could take it forward.

Rumors the company was in trouble were over a month old, and LinuxMedNews wrote then the best way for companies to protect themselves is with an open source system like WorldVistA.

There remain dozens of different EMR outfits, each with their own proprietary tweak to the technology, and the risk of failure for a company in this area is high. When such a failure occurs, LinuxMedNews writes, you're stuck unless you can control and support the code yourself.

Based on my experience elsewhere at ZDNet, I have to agree.