Survey: Cerner, Allscripts, CPSI Top Ranked Vendors in EHR Market

Cerner, Allscripts, and CPSI were the top ranked vendors in a survey of electronic health record (EHR) end users from Black Book Market Research.

The annual EHR user poll from the research firm revealed that Allscripts (Chicago-based), Cerner (Kansas City-based), and CPSI (Mobile, Ala.-based) were the top vendors according to their users in the inpatient hospital markets of 250-plus beds, 100-250 beds, and under 100 beds respectively. All three vendors were in these top spots last year, for Cerner and CPSI its been their fifth year in a row each in their market. 

For the under 100 bed market, CPSI received more than 90 percent satisfaction rating from nurses and clinicians and a 95 percent satisfaction rating from IT and financial leaders. For the 100-250 bed market, Cerner topped 90 percent in satisfaction ratings for both clinical and administrative personnel. The company also topped the "Hospital corporations, groups and chains" category. In the 250-plus beds market, Allscripts had an 83 percent satisfaction rating from the clinical side and a 92 percent satisfaction rating from IT/financial leaders.

The survey also revealed some of the divided feelings between end users and IT leaders over the EHR system. While 74 percent of technology leaders say the nurses had input in their EHR decisions, only 14 percent of nurses surveyed felt they had been involved. Nearly 70 percent of IT leaders say that the nurses' complaints are because of changes made to the system after it was implemented. 

The results of the survey also revealed that a good chunk of IT leaders, 19 percent, feel their EHR system is not a good fit for their organization. "Hospitals and their network affiliates find themselves trapped with an EHR system that does not and/or will not meet their foreseeable organizational needs,” Doug Brown, managing partner of Black Book, said in a statement.

The reasons for this include the vendor overselling system capabilities or mismatching functionalities to the hospital situation (65 percent), the EHR vendor cannot or will not flex to meet the hospital’s interoperability goals (81 percent), and the vendor is considerably more draining to hospital bottom line than anticipated with unexpected cost overruns and required add-ons to systems (90 percent). 

For the survey, 5,000 hospital EHR technology staff ballots and 14,000 nursing users were surveyed by Black Book representing 702 hospitals, in several polls conducted from August 2014 to February 2015.