Hospital EMR Buying Decisions: Heating Up or Cooling Down?

Which way do you lean? Are hospital EMR purchasing decisions heating up or cooling down?

In June of this year, KLAS released our annual Hospital EMR Market Share Report and every piece of research points to heating up. Meaningful use has largely died down in energy, and buzzwords like population health, interoperability, and a slew of others are now dominating the healthcare IT world. What impact do these new market trends and dynamics have on the replacements and purchasing of core hospital EMRs?

In 2015, KLAS validated that over 490 acute care hospitals were involved in an EMR contract decision of some kind, which represents an increase of almost 200% over 2014. That's nearly 10% of the entire US hospital market making an EMR decision in 2015 alone.

Why so much activity? Which EMRs are being selected and replaced over others? And how has recent M&A activity in this market impacted hospitals' decisions and thinking for the future? Who are the new entrants into the hospital EMR market that are shaking things up?

In subsequent blogs, we'll dive deeper into some of these intricate issues that are impacting US hospitals and their EMR choices - and what this means to the vendor community. These issues include the following:

• What's the latest activity with McKesson's go-forward platform, Paragon?
• Where are Cerner and Epic in terms of total US hospital EMR market share?
• How has the community hospital market reacted to new acute care EMR entrants athenahealth and eClinicalWorks?
• What are the trajectories of traditional community hospital EMR players Evident, Healthland (purchased by Evident/CPSI), and MEDHOST?
• What did 2015 mean for Allscripts and MEDITECH?