Stimulus funds shake up EHR marketHalf of all hospitals have 100 beds or fewer, meaning an electronic records system is typically a significant investment, said Lynne Dunbrack, program director at Health Industry Insights. Moreover, there’s a resource strain on implementing EHRs and EMRs. Many smaller institutions don’t have the staffing resources to deploy a complex solution, Dunbrack said. “Particularly if you’re doing it as an install package rather than a SaaS package, it’s a big effort to implement.” On the other hand, IDNs need to implement across all the sites, she noted. The stimulus package is likely to result in an increase in hospital EHR implementations, and in turn, vendors will have to meet the challenges of fulfilling increased demand. |
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3 TRENDS TO WATCH
Lynne Dunbrack of Health Industry Insights says the following trends will affect the hospital EHR market:
1. STIMULUS LEGISLATION: The passing of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is big news for EHRs and EMRs. “We think this is definitely going to spur the industry towards implementation,” Dunbrack said. 2. CERTIFICATION: EHRs need to be CCHIT certified, so that’s going to put considerable strain on the vendors to get certified. Those vendors who are certified may have more demand than they have capacity to deal with. 3. SaaS: Software-as-a-Service becomes appealing when organizations need an EHR solution that won’t strain their internal resources. “We’re seeing more SaaS particularly geared towards the smaller organization,” Dunbrack said. |
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Vendors look to make IT easier |
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Anoto Forms Solution |
Allscripts Enterprise |
Caretools iChart EMR |
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Cerner PowerChart |
DigitalPersona PRO |
Eclipsys Sunrise Clinical Manager |
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Practice Fusion |
Siemens Invision Clinicals |
T-Systen EV |
User Reviews |
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 "Siemens helped us realize that in order to advance productivity, increase our ROI, and improve the quality of patient care here at Denver Health, we needed to approach the use of information technology differently than we had in the past."Gregg Veltri, chief information officer, Denver Health and Hospital Authority |
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 "I was told to find the best EHR on the market. We chose Allscripts Enterprise because of its functionality for a flexible rollout and because it had the strongest feature set. We’ve already benefitted from implementation including both time and cost savings."Leslie Stanaback, director of information systems, Summit Medical Group |
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 "Our integrated Cerner Millennium electronic medical record has allowed us to create an easily accessible source of patient information. The Cerner Millennium EMR has helped us improve patient safety, increase physician and patient satisfaction, and better our efficiency and care coordination. The flexibility of the Cerner Millennium system allowed us to create an early warning alert to detect sepsis, which has potentially saved 4,000 lives and more than $2 million."Donna Abney, executive vice president, Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare |
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