A Push Toward Post–Acute Care Enterprise EMR Platforms

Like it or not, the consolidation of post–acute care vendors is and has been in high gear for several years.

Among the many post–acute care vendors in the market today, there are four who have separated themselves from the rest of the pack in terms of the number of post–acute care settings they support with an EMR.

A recent KLAS report, Post–Acute Care EMR Product Suites 2022, examines those four vendors’ solutions, their rate of adoption, and how well they are meeting setting-specific needs.

The Standout Vendors

The four post–acute care vendors that stand out from the rest are PointClickCare, MatrixCare, WellSky, and Netsmart, in no particular order. These four vendors have grown, either organically or inorganically, to cover most post–acute care settings with their EMR solution.

Three of the vendors, MatrixCare, WellSky, and Netsmart, grew through acquiring other EHR vendors and bringing them under their brand. PointClickCare has largely grown organically, but they have not grown much into the home-based side of post–acute care. Their offerings in this area are still in early stages.

While our main focus in this report was on post–acute vendors, we also included a look at the post–acute care offerings from enterprise acute care EMR vendors, including Epic, Cerner, and MEDITECH. These vendors fit the definition of a post–acute care vendor more loosely, but we felt they were still important to address.

A Trend in Acquisitions                                     

Outside of this report, KLAS has data that shows that there is nearly a 50% chance that an acquisition will be successful or result in no change in customer satisfaction in general. With some of the four major post–acute care vendors, KLAS has seen this data hold true when it comes to acquisitions. For example, the customer experience with Netsmart shows some gradual decline after each acquisition. This makes some unfortunate sense; all the factors involved in an acquisition can make the process difficult.

Broadening the KLAS Focus on Post–Acute Care

Doing more in-depth research on post–acute care solutions for this report served as an opportunity for KLAS to broaden our horizons in additional areas of post–acute care. Historically, KLAS has only researched home health, hospice, and long-term care. But we know there are other areas of post–acute care and other related technologies and care settings. So we looked at each of the post–acute care settings and which vendors had what in each area. From there, we started data collection on some net new areas and solutions to KLAS so that we could share vendors’ performance ratings as part of our data.

Through that work, we have been able to add Private Duty Nursing - Personal Care Services, and Senior Living - Assisted Living and Memory Care to our market segment list on the KLAS website. Both segments are still in early stages of research, but there are some vendors now shown. We have also begun collecting data on home infusion (another area where both MatrixCare and WellSky compete) and inpatient rehab solutions. If you are a healthcare provider that uses technologies in any of these care settings, please share your perspective by logging into the KLAS website and scheduling a call with us or taking an online evaluation.

More to Come

The next stage to further our post–acute care research will hopefully involve digging into these other areas that we've collected data on and building out this market segment with more data and insights. I talk in more detail about all the work we’re doing in post–acute care in a previous article, so if you’re curious, please check that article out.

As always, to learn more specifics around each vendor’s performance and what functionality customers are asking for, I recommend reading the full report.

Photo credit: cherryandbees, Adobe Stock