Officials at Practice Fusion, a San Francisco-based provider of free electronic health record software, announced Wednesday that the company has launched a free e-prescribing system for physicians.

"We're making this technology freely available to any doctor in the U.S. with no strings attached," said CEO Ryan Howard. "No one else offers a free EHR with e-prescribing like Practice Fusion. No one else can have it up and running for a doctor as fast."

"The e-prescribing feature of Practice Fusion is extremely easy to use and was very simple to learn in a matter of minutes, " said Sylvia Hazelwood, a nurse practitioner in Florida. "It utilizes the patient's current medication record so no additional input is needed. Ordering new medications and refills is a simple matter of a couple mouse clicks. When ordering is completed, the medication record is updated for me."

Practice Fusion touts itself as the fastest growing EHR community in the country, with more than 23,000 physicians and practice managers using its EHR.

"The e-prescribing system is integrated with our free electronic health record, but any verified doctor can use our e-prescribing system, whether they use our EHR or not," said Glenn Laffel, MD, Practice Fusion's senior vice president of  clinical affairs, on the company's blog.

Other vendors, including Allscripts-Misys Healthcare Solutions, DrFirst and Availity, have offered free Web-based e-prescribing solutions to physicians as part of state initiatives aimed at getting physicians to switch from paper prescriptions to electronic ones.