Dive Brief:
- More than one in 10 acute facilities and 16% of ambulatory facilities are leaving their current EHR vendor, a new Reaction Data survey finds.
- While providers routinely complain about EHRs, every vendor has organizations and physicians who are satisfied with their product.
- To increase user satisfaction, vendors need to profile their happy customers and find out what’s clicking, the survey says.
Dive Insight:
Rather than talk to CIO and IT leaders, Reaction looked at 889 physicians and the EHR systems they use for the survey. Preference varied according to specialty, size of the organization and facility type.
Epic is the most widely used EHR vendor, with 61% of the acute care facilities and 22% of ambulatory facilities. It also claims the lion’s share of the replacement business, at 33%. Other popular companies are Cerner, Allscripts, eClinicalWorks and athenahealth.
The survey also looked at at customer satisfaction for 10 EHR vendors and the types of facilities that best fit each company. For Allscripts, 16% of customers were happy and 12% were “on the fence” about the product. But their happiest customers had certain characteristics in common. They were ambulatory, averaged $1.5 billion in revenue, had 207 beds and about 239 physicians.
Practice Fusion had the highest customer satisfaction, with 70% of users happy and just 5% on the fence. The sweet spot: ambulatory facilities with $2.2 billion in revenue, 362 beds and 498 physicians.
Studies have shown physicians spend more than to half their time on EHR tasks, leading to physician burnout.
A growing number of healthcare leaders are seeking add-ons to help optimize EHR use, such as incorporating natural language processing, enabling advanced analytics and decision-support capabilities and supporting telehealth visits. In one survey last year, 68% of healthcare executives said adopting new technology and tools would improve clinician satisfaction.
Vendors are also starting to think outside the box about how to enhance EHRs. In an October interview with Healthcare IT News, Epic CEO Judy Faulkner said EHRs need to offer a more comprehensive record of a person’s health, including things such as social determinants of health and how much they sleep.