Is It a Hot or Cold Hospital EHR Buying Market?

In a recent blog post by Erik Bermudez, he asks the question about whether the Hospital EMR market is heating up or cooling down. He suggests that it’s heating up and offers this commentary as proof:

In 2015, KLAS validated that over 490 acute care hospitals were involved in an EMR contract decision of some kind, which represents an increase of almost 200% over 2014. That’s nearly 10% of the entire US hospital market making an EMR decision in 2015 alone.

We’ll see if this trend continues. No doubt there was a cooling off of the market as meaningful use matured in 2014. Given that cooling off period, it’s not really a surprise that it would start to heat up.

Eric also points out that buzzwords like population health and interoperability are dominating the conversation as opposed to EHR. I’d in the healthcare analytics buzzword to that list. These are indeed hot topics, but what’s interesting is that each of these topics really requires an EHR. You’re not likely to buy a healthcare analytics system if you don’t have an EHR. You need the data to be electronic (presumably in an EHR) to do the analytics (yes, I know there are edge cases where you don’t).

Given this dependency on EHR, we shouldn’t be surprised that many organizations are making an EMR decision. No doubt some healthcare organizations have an EMR that doesn’t support the advanced population health, interoperability and analytics initiatives they’d like to do. No doubt these advanced efforts are going to drive adoption of new EHR vendors that can support these efforts.

What do you think? Is the EHR buying market hot or cold? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

1 Comment

  • Yes, I believe the market is heating up. The stage 2 MU was a real pain for many providers – especially the patient portal. Despite that, 80% of hospitals have adopted a basic or certified EHR (Source: http://dashboard.healthit.gov/quickstats/pages/FIG-Hospital-EHR-Adoption.php) Now that the providers are using the EHR, many are realizing that the software they purchased is just not adequate; it just meets the minimum MU requirement and in many cases and is not user friendly at all. They are now looking to upgrade from the basic version and in that process are changing their EHR vendor too.

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