EHR Company Funding Risks – Large EHR Companies

This is the fourth post in my EHR Company Funding Risks series that was started in response to my original post about the The Current Health IT & EHR Bubble. In this series, we’re looking at the following EHR company categories: Seed Funded, Well Funded, Positive Cash Flow, Large EHR Company, and Large Company Backed EHR. Next up is Large EHR companies.

Large EHR Companies
Most of the EHR companies that fit into this category are publicly traded EHR companies (with a few notable exceptions). Each of these EHR companies has their own story, but the majority include some mix of EHR acquisition or EHR merger to get into or expand their EHR market reach. Often this means that the EHR company has more than one EHR software under their purview.

Many of the larger EHR group practices and particularly the multi specialty clinics look to the larger EHR companies because these large EHR companies have usually worked to try and cover every EHR specialty in their EHR. In most cases the EHR software has been around for a very long time. This is good because then the software is often mature, but it’s also bad because it’s often built on old technology.

The large complaint against these large EHR companies is that they’re large and impersonal. That they are out of touch with the customer. Of course, this is kind of the nature of being a large company and having a large user base. Plus, you can imagine the challenge listening across a half dozen different EHR software products.

The risks associated with these large EHR companies software usually has much less to do with cash flow and much more to do with the decisions of the EHR company executives. With multiple EHR software under their umbrella, will they choose to close the one you use down and focus on their other EHR products? Will your EHR product get lost in the corporate shuffle of priorities? Sure, they’ll still support your EHR product if there’s an issue, but have they dedicated the company resources to your EHR or to another product in the company’s portfolio?

One argument that larger EHR vendors have made is that they’re the only companies that have the resources available to create the EHR software of the future. Some argue that many of the smaller EHR companies won’t be able to meet meaningful use stage 3, because they don’t have the resources available to do that. Not to mention when we eventually have to do Watson like Smart EHR software integrations across large data sets. I think the first part about doing MU is overstated. I think the jury is still out on how smart EHR software will become over time and how smart physicians require their EHR to be.

Next up, we’ll look at Large Company Backed EHR. Read all the posts in the EHR Company Funding Risks series.

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.

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