Satisfaction is up among primary care physician electronic health record (EHR) users, according to a recent survey from the New York-based Black Book Market Research's Black Book Rankings.
The firm surveyed more than 2,000 primary care EHR users on eighteen key performance indicators. It also surveyed a multitude of specialty physician EHR users as well. Of those primary care physicians surveyed, only 8 percent were still “very dissatisfied” with the ability of their systems to decrease workload as compared to 31 percent of all medical and surgical specialists and 48 percent of primary care physicians in 2009. In the last six months, Black Book says primary care user satisfaction has increased prominently.
Furthermore, 39 percent of family practice, general practice, pediatricians and geriatric specialists report a return to normal levels of productivity after rolling out their EHR systems. This compares to last year, when only 10 percent of physician practices reported productivity returns after two years. The share of primary care doctors who would recommend their EHR vendor to a colleague increased from 13 percent to 52 percent over the past six months. Overall, these satisfaction increases, users say, come from the efforts of vendors to improve workflow issues, delivering on promises, meaningful use achievements, and fortified client support.
In terms of top performing vendors in this space, Black Book pointed to the San Francisco-based Practice Fusion as an industry leader, scoring first in user satisfaction across all surveyed EHR systems. Other top scoring primary care centric vendors include: Greenway Medical, Care360 Quest, Kareo, Praxis, AmazingCharts, CareCloud, CureMD, Allscripts, athenahealth, and eClinicalWorks.
Practice Fusion also scored best in specialty EHR user ratings and among all primary care physicians for system patient health data management and administrative processing, order entry and management, and results review and decision support.
"This first group of Black Book audited 2014 user survey results indicated a significant surge in vendor loyalty as the replacement market frenzy is settling down," Douglas Brown, Managing Partner of Black Book Rankings, said in a statement. "Continually high performing vendors with loyal customer bases have emerged from the pack as practice implementations succeed and physicians find the systems that truly meet their practice needs."
