Home Health EHR 2021
A Look at the Experience of Midsize to Large Home Health Agencies

MatrixCare Home Health Top Performer for Midsize Independent Agencies; Epic Provides Strong Experience for Health System–Owned Agencies

MatrixCare respondents report a positive, high-value experience that has remained consistent through an acquisition and rebranding. MatrixCare is the only vendor with the highest or second-highest rating in all standard KLAS metrics—notably, product development and quality. Customers report good implementation and training and proactive, helpful, communicative service and support. MatrixCare has a solid presence in small to midsize agencies; they have yet to become widely considered or used by agencies over 500 ADC. Epic is used almost exclusively by health system–owned agencies looking to leverage the Epic platform’s native integration. Vendor/client relationships are a strength. When it comes to the product, Epic has taken recent strides to improve; Epic’s efforts have resulted in consistent growth in client satisfaction over three years (by almost 10% total) as the vendor has rolled out product enhancements. Clients still want to see better usability and more home health functionality, especially in the remote client, where workflows are different, functionality is more limited, and patient information is not as up to date. MEDITECH also caters to health system–owned agencies and offers a strong customer experience, though most of their clients are small (1–200 ADC) and thus not the focus of this report.

Homecare Homebase Breadth of Functionality Drives Loyalty; Support Has Declined

Homecare Homebase is used broadly across home health agencies of all sizes and by the vast majority of the largest home health agencies. Today, their leading presence among large agencies appears secure—nearly all interviewed in this group plan to keep using Homecare Homebase well into the future because they feel no other solution could provide the comprehensive functionality large agencies require. This high loyalty comes despite a below-average overall experience. While the product has long been perceived as highly functional, customers feel the overall experience has not kept pace with the high expectations created by the solution’s cost. Homecare Homebase receives the lowest support ratings in this report. Challenges include understaffing, lack of product expertise, turnover, slow responses to issues, poor follow-up, and a backlog of tickets—all exacerbated by glitches and product QA issues. Fewer than half of respondents say the vendor keeps all promises. It is worth noting that Epic and WellSky have made some inroads with larger agencies, though less so with the very largest agencies.

WellSky Product Meets Needs; Customers Report Dip in Support amid Vendor Growth

WellSky has very large market share among small to midsize agencies, who choose the vendor for their easy-to-use, cloud-based platform that earns top usability scores. The platform generally meets the needs of midsize to large organizations, though many would like additional enhancements to the currently basic reporting (e.g., additional views and detail) and a better offline experience for nurses in the field. WellSky’s recent growth and acquisitions have hurt client satisfaction. Midsize agencies (200–1,499 ADC) report the biggest impact, including weakened relationships and insufficient communication. These respondents have felt lost in the shuffle of account managers and say support requests often languish. WellSky has a limited footprint among the largest agencies (1,500+ ADC). The few interviewed customers of this size report stronger communication and relationships and a better experience overall.

Netsmart Customers Looking Elsewhere as Product Development Lags and Vendor Focus Shifts to myUnity Platform

Larger Netsmart customers using either Homecare Advisor (acquired from Change Healthcare) or the Homecare platform (acquired from Allscripts) are dissatisfied, citing a marked decrease in development as they see a shift in focus to myUnity Enterprise—an integrated home health and long-term care platform (satisfaction data not shared as KLAS has not yet validated enough customers with >200 ADC). While interviewed customers say their current products have not been sunsetted, meaningful development has slowed—for example, Homecare Advisor users mention delays in the release of a tablet-based solution. Code quality in recent updates has also declined, resulting in numerous hotfixes. Additionally, customer/vendor relationships have deteriorated since Netsmart’s acquisition of the products. Many respondents are assessing their future with Netsmart; most are considering myUnity Enterprise alongside other vendors’ solutions.

About This Report

Each year, KLAS interviews thousands of healthcare professionals about the IT products and services their organizations use. These interviews are conducted using a standard quantitative evaluation, and the scores and commentary collected are shared in reports like this one and online in real time so that other providers and IT professionals can benefit from their peers’ experiences. To enable readers to more quickly understand high-level differences in vendor performance and give better context as to how each product compares to other offerings in the market, KLAS has organized the questions from the standard evaluation into six customer experience pillars—culture, loyalty, operations, product, relationship, and value.

To supplement the data gathered with this standard evaluation, KLAS also creates various supplemental evaluations that target a subset of KLAS’ overall sampling and delve deeper into the most pressing questions facing healthcare technology today.

The data in this report comes from standard evaluations only and was collected from December 1, 2019, to December 31, 2020. The number of unique responding organizations for each vendor is given in the chart below.