EHR Comparison Chart

A little while back I came across this EHR comparison chart on the Amazing Charts website. I was really intrigued. The first thing to note about the chart is that this is a page that’s designed to “sell” the Amazing Charts product. It’s actually a really smart move by Amazing Charts to use these comparisons as a way to increase their profile and compare them against many of the large EHR companies out there.

My biggest problem with an EHR comparison chart like this is that Amazing Charts conveniently decided to list themselves against a whole list of the HUGE and generally legacy EHR software companies. I don’t see the comparison chart including any of the Free EHR vendors. There are no EHR software companies that have come out in the past couple years on that list. There aren’t any of the more nimble EHR software companies that have done similar to Amazing Charts and focused on building an EHR company using revenue instead of outside funding.

Point being that an EHR comparison chart should include more of the 300+ EHR vendors that are out in the market today. If you only compare yourself to the largest and most expensive EHR software, then of course you look a lot cheaper. Plus, it seems they also focused on the most expensive EHR software from the companies that offer multiple EHR software as well.

The other challenge that they note in a footnote is that getting good pricing and EHR market share data is really hard. Most providers don’t publish it and as Dr. K mentions in this well written Future of Meaningful Use piece, “The sum of the number of installed users claimed by each of the top EMR vendors exceeds the number of practicing physicians in the U.S.”

Then, that EHR comparison chart also focuses a bit too much on the various EHR ratings services. I won’t dive into my feelings about the EHR ratings services that exist out there. Let’s just say that I wouldn’t base my EMR selection on any of those ratings services.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

2 Comments

  • John, there are several problems with EMR comparison charts. The simplest is that the market constantly changes. Vendors and products come and go. Companies change names and buy and sell products. Maintaining a list, as you have pointed out, is a constant task. The best thing would be if the vendors had to list themselves and their products. To put to fine a point on it, at our site, we list 625 products. I’m sure someone can top that.

    Even if we had an agreed upon list, the real problem as Dr. K mentions is that vendors are often, to put it gently, disingenuous. Even when they try their best, its a rare EMR marketing type who really knows all their products abilities.

  • Great post….
    Thank you for bringing this to everyone’s attention. The free EMR’s deserve to be recognized. Mitochon Systems http://mitochonsystems.com is one of those solutions. They serve the 1-9 physician practices and can be up and running in a couple of hours. SaaS solution, Certified, and FREE! What’s not to like about that. Have a look and let me know what you think about their solution.

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