Clinical Market Share

Almost 95 percent of provider organizations over 200 beds have already chosen their core clinical solution. However, vendors, such as GE and Siemens, are investing millions of dollars in next-generation systems. This begs several questions: Who will buy these new systems? Are there enough buyers to satisfy all the vendors and keep them healthy? Will available business, either new or replacement, be enough to sustain the market as it exists today? Which vendors are successfully selling new CIS solutions? And which vendors are being replaced?

KLAS talked with hospitals around the country in an effort to answer these and other questions. In the process, we validated the sales report of every major clinical vendor to verify accuracy, confirm that the purported sales were not just sales of modules, sort out those where two vendors claimed the same organizations, and facilitate comparisons.

HIT purchasing is complex and not entirely consistent with expectations. McKesson led the field contracting with 24 hospitals in 2007. More importantly for McKesson, over 80 percent of these were considered competitive wins where McKesson did not just leverage existing products to win. However, if buyers were looking specifically for a fully integrated product, McKesson would not likely have sold the most hospitals in 2007; the leader would have been a vendor like Cerner, Epic, or Meditech. If customer satisfaction were the sole driver, Epic would be the top seller. If CPOE were the key, one might expect Eclipsys to win, followed by Cerner. The reality is that providers see vendors bringing different strengths to the table that fit different needs.

Several interesting trends emerged in the course of this research. For one, vendor momentum and changes in the core clinical space are having significant impact on other market segments. Patient accounting and revenue management decisions are starting to hinge more and more on CIS decisions, with providers hoping to have a single, unified solution for both. Also, standalone pharmacy systems are rapidly being replaced as solutions from core vendors become a must-have and vendors that were missing an integrated or tightly coupled solution respond to this need, as Eclipsys recently did.

Incumbent wins are becoming less frequent as the current HIS solution seems to be having a smaller and smaller impact on current decisions except in the case of Siemens and McKesson where they continue to sell clinical systems to their legacy HIS customers.

Vendors qualifying for inclusion in the 2008 Clinical Market Share research are Cerner, CliniComp, CPSI, Custom, Eclipsys, Epic, GE, HMS, Keane, M2 Infosys, McKesson, Meditech, Medsphere, Opus Healthcare Solutions, QuadraMed, and Siemens.

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July 2008

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Clinical Market Share