Ranking Top 10 Hospital EMR Vendors by Number of Installed Systems
Clinical pathology laboratories will keep busy interfacing their LISs to these EMRs
Tis the season of electronic health records (EHR), now that both hospitals and physicians can qualify to earn incentives from the federal government when they implement these solutions and meet “meaningful use” criteria.
It is possible for individual hospitals to receive incentives totaling as much as $2 million for implementing a certified EHR. This is powerful motivation for cash-strapped hospitals. For that reason, pathologists and clinical laboratory managers of hospital laboratories can expect to be busy ensuring that their laboratory information system (LIS) interfaces properly with the EMR of their parent hospital.
It will be a huge undertaking. Early reports indicate that only a fraction of the nation’s 4,749 acute-care hospitals have implemented an EHR that meets the ARRA legislation’s “meaningful use” clause.
(Example of a functioning electronic medical record. Sourced from Wikipedia.)
According to an August 2010 article published in Health Affairs titled “A Progress Report on Electronic Health Records in U.S. Hospitals,” though installation of basic EHR systems rose slightly from 8.7% in 2008 to 11.9% in 2009, only 2% of America’s hospitals have implemented an EHR that could accomplish meaningful use and qualify for the incentive funds.
Nevertheless, the number of installations is growing, and will probably accelerate, due to an increasing number of physicians using EHRs. Dark Daily recently reported on this trend in “Hospital and Physician Adoption of EHRs Will Accelerate Because of Federal Incentives.”
According to the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), the number of physicians using any type of EHR doubled between 2006 and 2010, and those using fully functional EHRs nearly tripled.
Ranking of Hospital EMR Installations by Vendor
This list was compiled from the HIMSS Analytics Database, and reported in Modern Healthcare.
The counts are based on systems installations between February 2010 and February 2011 that are:
• live and operating,
• in the process of being installed,
• contracted but not yet installed.
| Vendor Name
|
Total Installations | Percent of Installations |
| • Meditech | 1212 | 25.5% |
| • Cerner | 606 | 12.8% |
| • McKesson | 573 | 12.1% |
| • Epic Systems | 413 | 8.7% |
| • Siemens Healthcare | 397 | 8.4% |
| • CPSI | 392 | 8.3% |
| • Healthcare Management Systems | 347 | 7.3% |
| • Self-developed | 273 | 5.8% |
| • Healthland | 223 | 4.7% |
| • Eclipsys (Bought by Allscripts) | 185 | 3.9% |
| The list is free and can be downloaded by clicking here. | ||
Medical laboratory administrators will find it interesting to note that just three healthcare IT companies control more than 50% of the hospital EMR market. Between them, Meditech, Cerner Corporation, and McKesson hold a collective 50.4% of hospital EMR installations, based on the HIMSS Analytics Database.
Of course, hospitals are not the only class of provider working to implement EMRs. Office-based physicians can qualify for federal incentives, and this year alone it is predicted that as many as 60,000 physicians will begin EMR implementations during 2011. This places a strain on the clinical laboratories and pathology groups that are asked to create interfaces between their LISs and the clients’ EMRs.
—Michael McBride
Related Information:
Top vendors of enterprise EMR systems: Modern Healthcare
A Progress Report on Electronic Health Records in U.S. Hospitals: Health Affairs
What is The Dark Report laboratory intelligence?
Sadly, the number of installations has no correlation to how competent an EMR can do their job. What will be a more interesting statistic is to see the percentage of those site, by vendor, who met ARRA Meaningful use. I’ve bet if you look at the 2% of hospitals that have already met Meaningful use, the Vendor will be totally different.
Another important element that ARRA does not evaluate is the usability of an EHR, having the data available in the system does not mean provder can use them as information in a clinical setting.
It’s exciting to see the progression of electronic medical records.
Saint Vincents is using Allscripts, if you value your life go elsewhere.
While the EMR is progressing at my network of hospitals, there is still a vile resistance of physician staff and hospital staff to utilize the EMR, eventhough it is one of the most user friendly to operate. The downsides to the EMR: reduction in force. This is a financial “plus”; however, if the system goes down for reasons ranging from system failure (servers, hardware, etc) to computer viruses–nothing is completely fail-safe in a web-based platform–then things must revert to paper until the issue is fixed/repaired. So in regards to reduction in force due to technological advancement they cannot “cut their nose off to spite their face”, so to speak when eliminating all medical records staff.
Our hospital network is currently moving into a stage 5 of 6 and it is “crunch time”; however, many of the physicians are still kicking and screaming and (after 6 years of the EMR system) still refuse to utilize what they’ve been given. What are they going to do when Medical Records Dept. is no longer? And that reality in my hospital network is coming true as of now. There will be zero Medical Records Dept on site at any hospital. This is your future of the advancement of the EMR. My best advice: Docs, it’s sink or swim time and to my fellow co-workers: even if you’re a coder, the program for auto-coding physician orders is here. All that time/money and testing you spent learning ICD9 and ICD10 coding will make you furious.
Good luck with the EMR of your choice, but do keep in mind, systems fail and if you have not retained any staff that is knowledgeable and trained to handle paper charts when there is a system failure, you are in trouble. Especially in a hospital setting and especially if the system is down for 3 weeks, as it was for us a couple years back. Don’t believe the hype that this is an end-all/be-all solution with the EMR. Stuff happens. Be prepared.