San Francisco-based AliveCor has inked a deal with electronic medical records company Practice Fusion that enables healthcare providers who use AliveCor's smartphone-enabled, single-channel ECG to import electrocardiogram readings, annotated reports and expert reviews into their EHR. If they are Practice Fusion users, of course.

AliveCor told MobiHealthNews in an email that the ECG readings will populate in Practice Fusion's EHR "within seconds".

The AliveCor-PracticeFusion package is offered for $7.50 a month on AliveCor's site. That includes an AliveCor Heart Monitor, its companion app, and the imports into the Practice Fusion EHR. Given Practice Fusion's claimed 100,000 monthly medical professional users, the deal also opens up a new marketing channel for the connected device maker and service provider, which began selling the iPhone-connected version of its ECG device in early 2013.

AliveCor recently announced that the FDA had cleared its Heart Monitor for over-the-counter use by patients, who previously needed a prescription from their physician to purchase the device. These OTC devices in the hands of patients will likely not yet transmit data into Practice Fusion -- even if that patient's physician is a Practice Fusion user.

Instead, D2C AliveCor users based in the US can transmit their ECG reading to either a remote cardiologist or a remote cardiac technician via AliveCor's direct-to-consumer service, called AliveInsights. Each time a user sends their ECG for analysis they have to pay a fee of anywhere from $2 to $12 per reading. The cardiac technician review is offered to AliveCor users thanks to a partnership the company has with eCardio, but a board-certified cardiologist review is also available to AliveCor users thanks to its partner CompuMed.

When Practice Fusion raised $15 million at the end of last year in a round led by Qualcomm Ventures, the company said it planned to use the funds to roll out new products and features in 2014. Those included a newly expanded API offering for developers that would enable integration with data from health devices.