I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where the world of hospital EHR software is going to head. At the top of the market we have Cerner and Epic taking most of the share. As we go down the market we see a lot of other large players, but we still only have 20 or so EHR vendors playing in the hospital EHR world.
In the last year we’ve seen aggressive moves by athenahealth and eCW to enter the hospital EHR space as well after previously only providing ambulatory EHR software. I’ve heard predictions that entrants like these are going to charge significantly less for their EHR software and that’s going to really shake up the market. You can imagine how the discussions in most hospitals will go if there’s an EHR alternative that’s 1/10th the price of their current EHR.
What’s interesting is that I haven’t seen any major moves by the large competitors to really accelerate the services, features, and functions they provide a hospital in order to justify the large premium. If I were Epic or Cerner, I’d be thinking about something really special that we could create that would be cost prohibitive for these new entrants to create. No doubt the Innovator’s Dilemma is at play here. Hard to fight against so much proven history around business dynamics.
Something that’s shocking to me is that these new entrants into the hospital EHR space aren’t really leveraging new technology either. They’re not building new features or functionality that doesn’t exist today (for the most part). They’re using things like cloud and mobile that are now relatively old technologies, but haven’t been applied to healthcare.
Said another way, will doctors love this new breed of hospital EHR any more than the current breed? I believe the answer to that question is no. Doctors will hate this new breed of EHR just as much. With this insight, I could imagine some other companies coming along and creating true innovation with new technologies that today we can’t even imagine. Although, it won’t likely be just technology innovation, but in healthcare it will likely include business model innovation as well.