KLAS: Epic Losing Ground To Cerner

At this point in the EMR buying cycle, one would figure that the market for new hospital EMR purchases is pretty saturated, especially among larger hospitals with the capital to invest in big health IT projects. But according to a recent blog entry from KLAS, that’s not exactly the case.

In his blog item, KLAS researcher Colin Buckley notes that his firm has been watching clinical IT vendor wins and losses at 200+ bed hospitals for 10 years.  During that period — and especially post- Meaningful Use — KLAS has seen a growing number of new hospital EMR contracts.

By this point, after lots of EMR buying, and some switching out technology for second and third-choice EMRs, one might think that over-200-bed hospitals had settled on a platform that they could live with through Meaningful  Use Stage 3. Actually, not quite, Buckley says.

In fact, KLAS data shows that there are more hospitals running legacy EMRs, homegrown EMRs or no EMR at all than those who have bought a currently-marketed solution sometime in the past four years. And it’s likely these hospitals will be choosing a new EMR from the current vendor marketplace within the new few years, KLAS projects.

As sales increase in the 200+ bed hospital segment, market forces are shifting to favor new vendors. What’s particularly noteworthy about this is that the research firm has seen the ratio of Epic-to-Cerner wins shrink from 5-to-1 in 2010 to 2-to-1 in 2012.

According to KLAS, the hospitals that are likely to be out buying new EMRs look different than those which have already bought and implemented the EMR they’ll use for the next several years. “They are smaller and more cost conscious than the large hospital IDNs that have given Epic a lion’s share of wins year after year,” Buckley writes.

With Cerner and Epic busy eating each other’s lunch, Allscripts, MEDITECH, McKesson and Siemens are moving ahead as quickly as possible to roll out integrated ancillary and ambulatory solutions, Buckley notes. In other words, the competition for both ambulatory and hospital EMRs is far from played out.

Despite all of this activity, we are clearly in a late stage of the EMR market as a whole, or as my colleague John Lynn puts it, “the Golden Age of EHR adoption is over.” But if KLAS is right, there’s still some very healthy bucks to be made selling to laggard mid-sized hospitals. Let’s see if vendors used to serving hospital giants can adapt in time.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

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