Orthopedic EMR 2018
Who Meets the Needs of Orthopedic Practices?

The EMRs from specialty-specific vendors SRS Health and Modernizing Medicine deliver an above-average charting and usability experience. Highly flexible and customizable, SRS Health’s solution follows the workflow of an orthopedic visit and mimics the way orthopedists think, speeding up the documentation process and freeing physicians to focus on the patient instead of documentation. SRS Health customers are more likely than other vendors’ customers to cite the EMR’s facilitation of dictation as one reason for its ease of use. Modernizing Medicine customers appreciate that their EMR—EMA™—is tailored to orthopedic groups, noting that the specialization allows them to quickly and efficiently complete their documentation. Modernizing Medicine’s EMR is cloud based and can be used across various devices, including tablets and laptops, helping clinicians maintain a connection with patients while documenting. Additionally, a number of clients say the integrated coding prompts ensure smooth billing.

Epic customers feel their requests are addressed quickly and resolved appropriately. The support personnel seem knowledgeable and empowered to resolve customer concerns. The limited number of interviewed customers for Greenway Health Intergy and NextGen Healthcare report recent improvements to their support, saying that issues are resolved quickly by empowered, competent representatives. NextGen Healthcare customers enthusiastically describe the support as “prompt,” “excellent,” and “awesome.” In contrast, Aprima and athenahealth, who have historically delivered satisfactory support for their general ambulatory customers, struggle to provide knowledgeable support representatives for orthopedic practices. eClinicalWorks has the lowest rating, with customers reporting long wait times, slow responses, language barriers, and excessively long resolution times.

Cerner and Epic are the only two enterprise EMR vendors fully rated in orthopedics. Ratings for Epic are fairly consistent across customers, who say Epic has made great efforts to help them adapt the EMR to an orthopedic setting, specifically calling out the Bones module as a driver of their satisfaction. They say this module, in conjunction with Epic’s Express Lanes, promotes efficiency, reduces the number of clicks, and increases usability. The majority of interviewed Cerner customers are quite satisfied with the EMR’s orthopedic workflows once they are set up and optimized, and they emphasize the benefits of Cerner’s MPages, which allow for customization and significant gains in efficiency. However, 4 of the 15 interviewed customers are not as satisfied with Cerner’s workflows, rating them a 6.0 or less (out of 9.0). These customers are smaller facilities who feel the functionality is overwhelming at times and have had difficulty customizing the solution.