I’m always interested in ways to try and differentiate the various EMR and EHR vendors. I’m completely sympathetic with doctors who are sorting through the 300+ EMR Companies in the marketplace. Most doctors I know, don’t want to become software selection experts or at least don’t want to spend their free time doing it.

However, it’s amazing the various services out there that try and capitalize on this need that doctors have to narrow down the field of EHR vendors. I think that’s basically what the Black Book EMR Rankings (listed on Amazon even) are basically doing with their EHR rankings. Yes, I know Black Book’s been around for a while, but I just saw it again and had to post.

They try and say that they sent the survey out to 70,000 “physician leaders and non-clinical administrators of publicly traded hospital corporations, private hospitals, academic medical institutions, multispecialty medical group practices, small and multiple physician practices, hospitalist groups, emergency departments, institutional members and officers of various healthcare/medical and IT professional organizations, subscribers of our media partners and previously validated survey participants.”

The problem is that they only received “4502 validated respondents ranked 174 EMR suppliers.”[emphasis mine] I’m not a statistics guru, but I wouldn’t be putting my EMR selection on an average of 25 responses per EMR. Plus, for many EMR it was likely much lower than 25. Not to mention, they only had responses from 174 companies. What about the other 126+ EHR vendors that had 0 responses?

Plus, the Black Book breaks it down even further by size of practice. They have 6 categories in just the ambulatory side. That’s an average of just over 4 responses per EHR vendor per category size. Although, it’s less since they have a bunch of acute care categories as well.

When you look at the list, I see a lot of the major EHR companies and a bunch of companies I’ve never heard of before. Not to mention there are a lot of big time EHR players from companies that Black Book probably has never heard about that aren’t on the list.

Unfortunately, there’s no real quality source to differentiate the various EHR companies. If there was I’d shout it from the rooftops (or at least my blog). Until then, the only solution is the work of reviewing your needs and evaluating the various EHR software yourself.

Since I’m sure many will wonder what EHR vendors made the Black Book list, here’s the list of Top Ambulatory EHR companies by practice size after the break:
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HIMSS Analytics recently sent out some interesting results from a survey the did of hospital’s preparation for meaningful use. Here’s the results:

*Nearly one quarter (22 percent) of participating hospitals have the capability to achieve 10 or more of the required core measures in the meaningful use Stage 1 requirements.

*Some 34 percent of respondents have the capability to achieve between five and nine of the core measures for meaningful use.

*Just over 40 percent (40.47 percent) of the market indicated they have the capability to meet five or more of the menu items for meaningful use.

As lone data points it’s hard to judge if hospitals are making progress or not. I’ve heard many people say that hospitals are going full bore towards meaningful use and that ambulatory practices are slower to adopt EMR and meaningful use. I’m not sure this is totally true. Plus, the lead time needed to implement in an ambulatory setting is so much shorter than in a hospital. Even a hospital that owns ambulatory practices.

I’m told that HIMSS Analytics will be doing this same survey every couple months. I’ll see about publishing the results as I get them so we can compare the change.

A recent Information Week article on EHR adoption had the following quote:

“I think the number one driver [of ambulatory EHR adoption] is the change in reimbursement, the fact that it is becoming so complicated to document the process of care to get paid by the government as well as commercial payers,” said Nancy Fabozzi, a senior industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan and the report’s author. “Everybody thinks that fee-for-service is doomed and we have to have a new system of reimbursing physicians for the quality of care instead of the quantity of care because costs are exploding.”

In an interview with InformationWeek, Fabozzi said another reason for the adoption of ambulatory EHRs is that many providers have practice management systems that are old and need to be updated as they move to ICD-10 and HIPAA 5010 requirements.

It won’t be news to most of you that it’s not government incentive that is driving adoption of EHR software. The market forces are much stronger than any sort of stimulus. Although, the retarding forces of an unknown stimulus are starting to wear off and we should see EHR adoption pick up again soon.