EMR Sales at $18 Billion in 2011

Healthcare Financial News posted the following number of the EMR market.

Propelled by government incentives, a desire to improve patient outcomes and the bottom line, sales of electronic medical records reached $17.9 billion in 2011, up 14.2 percent from the previous year, according to market research publisher Kalorama Information.

I’m not sure of the exact EHR incentive figures for 2011, but I have seen the number $3.1 billion paid to 43,000 providers from Justin Barnes. It’s no doubt somewhere in that range and is an interesting number to compare against the $14.2 billion in EHR sales in 2011.

That’s quite a big difference in number. I’m sure many doctors would easily argue that the difference is because the EHR incentive money doesn’t cover all the costs to get an EHR. I’m sure there were also many EHRs purchased in 2011 that won’t see EHR incentive money until 2012. It will be really interesting to see these numbers again at the end of 2012. I also wish they’d have broken the number out by hospital EHR and ambulatory EHR. I have a feeling that hospital EHR software dominates that number.

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.

4 Comments

  • Good insight. I have did a small research on EMR/EHR implementations some months ago, to get a picture on how electronic records are accepted at the physician’s end. It gave me some idea about the factors that influence resistance for EHR. Some of them were valid points indeed. EHRs can be adopted by hospitals, but single practice find it very difficult to take up. Main reason is cost factor, no time, followed by knowledge barrier in terms of technology and then resistance from staff, to mention a few.

  • Madhumitha,
    Some very good points. The cost issue is becoming less and less of an issue thanks to low cost EHR software and even a number of Free EHR softwares. Resistance from staff is still the hardest challenge to overcome.

  • Thanks, John.

    I feel that there is too much pressure on physicians’ head. Physicians should be encouraged for improving the quality of healthcare. There are lot of things that we need to fix. Even after the healthcare industry has evolved for many years, we are not able to fix the deadly diseases like cancer. So, we shouldn’t disturb the physicians for anything. If physicians are over burdened with new healthcare implementations, I am wondering how the future of healthcare innovations would be. I strongly feel that all other arrangements should be handled by government, including this EMR. I feel that EMR should be centralized and provided by the government for free to physicians.

  • Madhumitha,
    I don’t agree that the government should provide EMR. Look at the UK and what happened there when they tried that. Plus, that’s a much simpler healthcare system and SOOO much smaller than the US.

    It might be a good idea for smaller countries with government health, but not the US.

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