Research from the ONC concludes that Cerner systems are in use by the most hospitals using certified technology to participate in the Medicare EHR Incentive Program. It’s interesting to note that this list includes players that rarely appear on overall lists of top hospital EHR vendors, though admittedly, there’s no one way to measure market dominance that produces consistent results every time.
According to ONC statistics, there were 175 vendors supplying certified health IT to 4,474 nonfederal acute-care hospitals participating in the Medicare EHR Incentive Program. Ninety-five percent of these vendors have 2014 certified technology.
The report notes that six of these vendors (Cerner, Meditech, Epic, Evident, Medhost and McKesson) provide 2014 certified technology 92% of hospitals using the technology. When you throw in athenahealth, Prognosis and QuadraMed, bringing the list to 10 vendors, you’ve got a group that supplies 2014 technology to 98% of eligible hospitals.
According to the data, the vendors at the top fall in as follows. Cerner tops the list of total hospitals using its certified health IT, with 1,029 hospitals; Meditech was next with 953 hospitals; Epic came in third with 869 hospitals; CPSI’s Evident (formerly Healthland) was fourth with 637 hospitals; McKesson fifth with 462 hospitals; and Medhost sixth with 359 hospitals.
As is usually the case with any attempt to look at market share, the data comes with its own quirks. For example, when looking at ONC’s data as of July 2016 on ambulatory healthcare providers choice of certified technology, Epic was way ahead of the pack with 83,674 users. Allscripts came in at a distant second with 33,123 users. Cerner came in sixth with 15,100 ambulatory users. In other words, vendors one might class as “enterprise” focused are doing well among clinicians. (See more data along these lines in a Medscape survey I summarized previously.)
Then consider data from HIMSS Analytics, which concludes that Epic has 40% of the hospital health IT market, followed by Cerner at a distant second with 13%, Allscripts at 10%, Meditech at 7% and eClinicalWorks at 5% and NextGen with 4%. Why the big difference in numbers? It seems that HIMSS Analytics includes the size of the hospital in its calculations versus the ONC data above which talks about the number of hospitals.
No doubt the buying patterns vary when you look at the number of beds a hospital has. For example, according to research done last year by peer60, CPSI and eClinicalWorks held the biggest share of the market among facilities with less than 100 beds, MEDITECH, McKesson and Siemens dominated the mid-sized hospital categories, and as the number of beds rises from 250 to 1000+ plus, Cerner and Epic emerge as the top players.
The truth is, market share numbers are interesting, and not just to the vendors who hope to emerge on top. Everyone loves a good horse race, after all. But it’s good to take these numbers with a large dose of context, or they mean very little.
