EHR Selection Services

Those of you who’ve read my Free e-Book on EMR selection know that one of the things I suggest you do is to narrow down your list of EHR vendors to a small group of ~5 EHR vendors to start your EHR selection process. The book has the full rationale, but the challenge is that with 600 EHR companies out there you can’t review them all.

Of course the next question I’m asked is how you narrow down the companies to start your EHR selection review process. One thing that’s really developed over the 6 years I’ve been blogging is the EHR selection services. They’re still all far from perfect, but I suggest you take a look at a couple of them to start getting a list of EMR companies that you might want to consider. Then, take those lists and ask around to your colleagues. I call this approach triangulating the EHR data points to get you down to a smaller group of EHR companies.

One challenge is that there are a lot of EHR selection website out there. Here are just a few for you to consider. If you’re just looking for a really simple way to get access to price quotes and demos of EHR software, then go check out Software Advice or EHR Scope.

If you want a deeper, more custom EMR / EHR matching system then you’ll want to take a look at EMR Consultant, EHR Selector, and Hielix Apps. All 3 of these websites have made significant investments to try and help doctors match their needs with the EHR software.

I’ll admit that I’m probably a little bias towards EMR consultant since they’ve been around ever since I first started blogging about EMR. Plus, I love that it’s free. Although, a little birdie told me that EHR selector is considering a Free EHR selection option as well. There’s something I really love about the free EHR selection model. Basically, physicians that use it to help with their EHR selection have very little to lose.

Hielix on the other hand costs a few hundred dollars to use. They did send me a promo code for those that want $25 off their service. Just enter: “EMRANDEHR” Hielix is definitely taking a much more hands on approach to the EHR selection process so it makes some sense that they’d charge for the service. In one email exchange with them they talked about their CEO meeting with one of their customers to discuss their report. I’m sure many doctors will like this type of high touch service.

Always trying to get some good info for my readers, I got permission to publish a PDF file of a sample report that Hielix produces. I think the really good stuff in this report starts about page 7.

As I said previously, none of the EHR selection services are perfect. Although, I think using a couple of them isn’t a bad idea to start narrowing down the long list of EHR companies. I see it as an extra data point that can be used to narrow your list. Unfortunately, none of these services make it so you don’t have to do a thorough evaluation of multiple EHR vendor before you buy. I’d love it if someone figured out how to solve that problem. Until then, an EHR selection service isn’t a bad place to start.

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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