Is the Grass Greener: Ambulatory EMRs

Am I crazy, or is the room really crowded when you invite all the ambulatory EMR vendors over for a chance to sell? Last week during lunch we asked some of the KLAS team the theoretical question, “Which EMR would you buy if you were out looking today?” Wow, that created a firestorm. 

We talked about an Allscripts site that moved to eCW, an eCW customer that wants to move to Allscripts, a Practice Partner site looking closely at NextGen, a NextGen customer about to sign with Epic, a GE site wondering if they should make a switch even though they just finished implementing and hundreds of practices looking at systems we can only find on the internet.

What can you bank on for the next 10 years in your practice? Epic scores great in very large practices and Greenway in smaller practices, but the results are decidedly mixed for most solutions. Some vendors do great in small practices, but everything blows up when they try to scale. Other vendors can handle the big sites, but the complexity and costs choke smaller buyers. And while these vendors continue to sell, implementation teams are spread thin and support is overwhelmed.

No one at KLAS is jealous of the buyers in this EMR space, where overall satisfaction continues to decline. The products continue to get better, but attention from the vendors will be at a premium the next few years. Does it do any good to switch horses? Just make sure the vendor you are switching to really solves the core issue that was the problem with your previous vendor – and that you’re aware of the new issues you will face. As the guru on the mount says, “Pick your vendor, pick your set of problems.”

Is the grass really greener on the other side?