I got the following email from the CIO of a hospital.
They’ve [Quadramed] got the whole ONC-ATCB certified EHR for Phase 1 MU (although the point in your post is valid about that certification being fairly general anymore). They are working on obtaining and integrating/interfacing ambulatory functionality for physician practices, but for hospitals they have some pretty good sized hospitals running their QCPR product. KLAS includes them in their evaluation of EHR vendors (along with the likes of Allscripts, Cerner, Epic, GE, McKesson, Meditech, and Siemens) although they clearly don’t have as many installed hospitals that most of that list has. They also need to develop some real patient portal type of functionality to stay certified for future MU Phases. Not a market leader, but they are a market player. In spirit of full disclosure, we are almost live with Quadramed product, and we will be using it as a full EHR for both inpatient and outpatient care settings. We could not afford the bigger vendor solutions, and Epic wouldn’t even talk with us because we are below their minimum size to qualify for their sales efforts….only vendor I’ve seen that has that luxury of flat out ignoring possible business. We didn’t like the inflexibility of the lower end EHR vendors, and Quadramed provided a lot of the flexibility of bigger vendors for the price of the smaller vendors.
I’d love to learn where other hospital CIOs turn when Epic won’t give them the time of day. Considering Epic’s hospital size requirements and who they will work with, this is more hospitals than not. I started a list of hospital EMR and EHR vendors that might help. Where do hospital CIOs go when Epic isn’t an option? Is there a Denied by Epic support group somewhere online where hospital CIOs can commiserate?