Practice Fusion will guarantee your stimulus cash

Practice Fusion says it will guarantee you can meet the 2011 "meaningful use" guidelines needed to collect up to $44,000 in sweet, sweet stimulus cash.

Practice Fusion, a free, ad-supported Electronic Health Record (EHR) vendor, has already put a certification center for the new program on its Web site.

The move follows by just a week an agreement with BioReference Laboratories to integrate its test results into the Practice Fusion EHR and co-market to BioReference's customers. BioReference is the third-largest full-service lab in the country.

Practice Fusion's traction in the market has Blogging Stocks asking, again, whether it makes sense to give away stuff for free. (Answer -- great Googly-moogly yes.)

It's an audacious strategy Practice Fusion is trying, one that goes against the grain not only of traditional vendors but of its main SaaS rival, AllScripts, which recently signed a deal with a major New York hospital chain to assure distribution.

All of which sets up an interesting battle between top-down, affiliate marketing, in which doctors are pressed to comply with orders of business partners, and bottom-up, mass marketing, in which they're given the tools they claim they need.

Which do you think will win? [poll=31]