Among hospital electronic health record (EHR) users and healthcare IT leaders, loyalty to inpatient EHR vendors decreased from 81 percent to 75 percent, according to a Black Book 2016 Inpatient EHR survey.
In addition, about a quarter of respondents to the survey currently feel that their loyalty to their vendor is based on administrative directives due to high capital investments rather than on actual satisfaction, usability or product suites available within the brand family.
For the survey, Black Book Market Research polled 3,152 current hospital EHRs on their intentions to renew current contracts, buy additional products and services such as health information exchange (HIE), population health tools and revenue cycle management, as well as the likelihood that they would recommend their inpatient EHR/HIT vendor to peer hospitals. Also, 640 IT leaders in some phase of EHR replacement or installation gave vendor-specific feedback on their impressions and opinions on the next generation of EHR support solutions, according to a press release about the survey results.
This year’s annual inpatient EHR survey included feedback on new generation EHR and advanced support solutions such as interoperability, cloud innovations, patient engagement, mobile optimization, security and privacy enhancements, big data and population health support, revenue cycle management support and technical support.
According to the survey, for client satisfaction, Allscripts ranked first for medical centers over 250 beds; Cerner for community hospitals with 101 to 250 beds and Evident/CPSI for small and rural hospitals under 100 beds.
“Allscripts, Cerner and Evident/CPSI are scored best in the four previous years among their respective hospital client categories,” Doug Brown, president of Black Book, said in a statement. “With the added loyalty index and the extensive survey on next generation EHR solutions, it is notable that these same vendors have again emerged as the industry top performers in usability and functionality.”
Rising fast among smaller hospitals’ replacement interest are the cloud-based inpatient EHR solutions developing by athenahealth and eClinicalWorks, according to the 2016 survey results.
In the Loyalty research, Black Book found the highest increases in year-over-year brand loyalty among the inpatient EHR customers of Allscripts, Cerner, Evident/CPSI and athenahealth.
Cerner also received top ranking for usability and functionality by hospital-based nurses and hospitalist physicians in the 2016 poll.
Black Book also polled participants about their current EHR vendors’ functionalities with regard to next generation EHR tools and support solutions. For instance, participants ranked Allscripts, athenahealth and Cerner high for interoperability and connectivity and for big data and population health, participants cited Allscripts, Cerner, Epic Systems and McKesson.
