In terms of application hosting, healthcare providers are achieving greater success and satisfaction working with software vendors, but are able to host a wider selection of applications by partnering with services firms, according to new research from KLAS (Orem, Utah).
The report, entitled, Application Hosting: Offloading Risk and Cost, found that services firms offer the breadth to host a variety of applications but often deliver lower customer satisfaction than software vendors, while the software vendors deliver better performance but typically host only their own solutions.
For providers who want all major solutions — including clinical information systems, hospital information systems and enterprise resource planning systems — hosted by the same company, ACS, CSC, Perot and PHNS are the primary options, says KLAS. However, in most cases, the hosting clients of services firms experienced greater downtime issues than clients of software vendors, and some firms were criticized for a lack of healthcare experience.
Software vendors, on the other hand, ranked in terms of focus and experience in healthcare, as 90 percent of respondents using Cerner, McKesson and Siemens hosting services say they would recommend their vendor to other providers, while fewer than half of ACS and Velocity respondents would do the same.
The top-rated vendor in the report was Cerner, with a score of 84.7, followed by NaviSite (82.8) and McKesson (80.8). Other vendors highlighted in this report are ACS, CSC, Eclipsys, GE, Perot Systems, PHNS, Siemens and Velocity.
For more information or to purchase the report, please visit www.KLASresearch.com/reports.
