Dive Brief:
- A Black Book Market Research survey of 1,200 hospital executives and 2,100 user-level IT staff found that hospitals and health systems that replaced EHR systems in the past three years are disappointed with the outcomes.
- A whopping 87% of financially threatened hospitals said they regretted changing their EHR systems and 14% of all hospitals that replaced their original EHR since 2011 stated they were losing inpatient revenue at a pace that would not support the total EHR replacement cost.
- The decision to replace EHR systems is risky, said Doug Brown, managing partner at Black Book because hospitals, "would not be back to their EHR-implementation patient volumes, inpatient or ambulatory, for at least another five years."
Dive Insight:
Additional survey findings found 62% of non-managerial IT staff said the EHR replacement had a significant negative impact on healthcare delivery and 90% of nurses said the change diminished their ability to deliver hands-on care effectively. However, only 5% of hospital leaders said the EHR replacement affected care in any negative way.
EHR replacements did cost some their jobs. Seven percent of surveyed staff at the managerial level or higher said they or co-workers were fired or asked to resign directly due to replacement costs or productivity impacts and 19% said layoffs were caused by implementation delays, high costs, insufficient budgets or unavailable trained personnel. At the executive level, 63% said they felt in employment jeopardy during the EHR replacement process.
Interoperability and patient data exchange function declined after initiating a replacement EHR, according to 66% of system user respondents.
EHR replacement salespeople exaggerated the automatic buy-in of physicians by hospitals - 80% of IT staff said they had to coerce network physicians to adopt replacement EHRs, 88% of hospitals said they couldn't report any competitive advantages of their new system to attract physicians, and 78% of non-physician executives said the clinical buy-in never happened after a replacement system was launched.