Hospitals Using Market-Leading EHR Have Higher HIE Use

A new study concludes that hospital engagement with HIEs is tied with the level of dominance their EHR vendor has in their marketplace. The study, which appeared in Health Affairs, looked at national data from 2012 and 2013 to look at how vendor dominance related to hospitals’ HIE involvement level. And their analysis suggests that the more market power a given vendor has, the more it may stifle hospitals’ HIE participation.

As researchers note, federal policymakers have expressed concern that some EHR vendors may be hampering the free flow of data between providers, in part by making cross-vendor HIE implementation difficult. To address this concern, the study looked at hospitals’ behavior in differently-structured EHR marketplaces.

Researchers concluded that hospitals using the EHR which dominated their marketplace engaged in an average of 45% more HIE activities than facilities using non-dominant vendors. On the other hand, in markets where the leading vendor was less dominant, controlling 20% of the market, hospitals using the dominant vendor engaged in 59% more HIE activities than hospitals using a different vendor.

Meanwhile, if the dominant EHR vendor controlled 80% of the market, hospitals using the leading vendor engaged in only 25% more HIE activities than those using a different vendor. In other words, high levels of local market dominance by a single vendor seemed to be associated with relatively low levels of HIE involvement.

According to the study’s authors, the data suggests that to promote cross-vendor HIE use, policymakers may need to take local market competition between EHR vendors into consideration. And though they don’t say this directly, they also seem to imply that both high vendor dominance and low vendor dominance can both slow HIE engagement, and that moderate dominance may foster such participation.

While this is interesting stuff, it may be moot. What the study doesn’t address is that the entire HIE model comes with handicaps that go beyond what it takes to integrate disparate EHR systems. Even if two hospital systems in a market are using, say, Cerner systems, how does it benefit them to work on sharing data that will help their rival deliver better care? I’ve heard this question asked by hospital financial types, and while it’s a brutal sentiment, it gets to something important.

Nonetheless, I’d argue that studying the dynamics of how EHR vendors compete is quite worthwhile. When a single vendor dominates a marketplace, it has to have an impact on everyone in that market’s healthcare system, including patients. Understanding just what that impact is makes a great deal of sense.

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.

2 Comments

  • Where I live, the major hospital systems have ‘big league’ EHR’s yet you see little or no HIE, at least that patients can see. Even a hospital whose doctors are mainly in other hospital groups have no direct connection between EHR’s, let alone connections to large lab groups. The real drivers seem to be either cost of the connections, or whether these competing groups are at all willing to cooperate.

  • Indeed R Troy. The real problem with HIEs is that healthcare organizations are competitors and they don’t want to share (in many cases for good business reasons).

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