Electronic health record (EHR) giant Epic Systems continues to lead the way in acute care hospital market share, while its top competitor Cerner saw a net decrease in market share for the first time since KLAS began tracking losses in 2010.
The new report released this week from the Utah-based KLAS, “U.S. Hospital EMR Market Share 2020,” revealed that historically, Cerner has been the only vendor besides Epic to add hospital market share each year. However, in 2019, four large organizations left Cerner, and with no government contracts to make up the loss, Cerner saw a net decrease in market share for the first time since KLAS began tracking losses 10 years ago.
According to the report, Epic experienced a massive 55-net increase in acute care hospital market share year-over-year, with 28 customer add-ons, 24 new integrated delivery network contracts, and six new standalone hospital contracts, compared with just three legacy platform losses.
Cerner, meanwhile, saw 40 legacy “go-forward” platform losses and 12 legacy platform losses. It did, however, sign 27 new hospital/health system contracts while netting 16 new customer add-ons in the last year.
According to KLAS, this decrease for Cerner is especially notable in terms of number of hospital beds. “The two largest drivers for organizations leaving Cerner are standardization to Epic and Cerner’s lack of tangible improvements to the revenue cycle solution. Cerner won the most standalone facilities in 2019; most of these organizations are smaller organizations that value Cerner’s robust clinical system and ability to scale to the needs of smaller hospitals. In 2019, no legacy Siemens customers migrated to Millennium,” the report stated,
One vendor in this space that had a strong year was Meditech, seeing a 29-net increase in acute hospital market share. According to KLAS, most of the organizations that contracted for the company’s Expanse platform in 2019 are community hospitals (26 to 200 beds), but one large organization (400+ beds) also chose to consolidate to Expanse. “The Expanse platform is expanding Meditech’s appeal, drawing interest and purchases from organizations outside Meditech’s legacy customer bases and from types of organizations that haven’t typically considered Meditech in the past,” the report noted.
Epic’s market share, meanwhile, continued to grow across organizations of all sizes in 2019, and now accounts for just under 40 percent of the acute care beds in the U.S. Just over half of Epic’s “wins” were competitive decisions; the remainder were the result of standardization and acquisition. Cerner accounts for about 29 percent of the acute care beds in the country, and Meditech 15 percent.
Broken down further by hospitals, Epic has 29 percent of the acute care market share, and Cerner 26 percent.
