Patient Access 2021
How Well Do Enterprise EMR Vendors Meet Organization Needs?

High Customer Satisfaction with Epic; Cerner Clients Struggle to Integrate with Third Parties

Epic Customers Eager for Future Development; Cerner Customers Unsure of Long-Term Patient Access Needs Being Met

Customers of Epic and MEDITECH are optimistic about their vendor’s future development of patient access capabilities. Epic clients mention the benefits of having a standardized, integrated workflow contained in the Epic environment and look forward to implementing new functionality as it becomes available. Because MEDITECH’s solution is still being developed, customers are not sure whether they will more fully adopt future functionality from the vendor rather than continuing with third-party solutions. Many are satisfied with the delivered functionality so far and remain hopeful about MEDITECH’s future patient access development. Respondents using Cerner feel the vendor’s solution falls behind others in the market, largely due to aforementioned integration issues. While a few customers expect to see some improvements, the majority wish Cerner would offer more native patient access functionality and question whether Cerner will meet their long-term patient access needs.

Cerner Perceived as Struggling to Deliver New Technology

Cerner customers highlight the relationship they have with Cerner and the support they receive. Cerner relies on third parties to meet the majority of customers’ patient access needs, and while not directly asked, respondents did not mention Cerner sharing a road map for future development in this area. Several customers are unsatisfied with this approach; nearly 40% of respondents say that although they use a Cerner-recommended third party for patient access, the integration is insufficient. Even among those who are satisfied with the existing integration, multiple are frustrated with the number of add-ons required. 63% of respondents are dissatisfied with Cerner’s delivery of new technology, and some feel Cerner is behind the curve. Many would like to see Cerner address these issues by investing more into their patient access offering.

Majority of MEDITECH Customers See Success with Patient Access

About This Report

Each year, KLAS interviews thousands of healthcare professionals about the IT solutions and services their organizations use. For this report, interviews were conducted over the last 12 months using KLAS’ standard quantitative evaluation for healthcare software, which is composed of 16 numeric ratings questions and 4 yes/no questions, all weighted equally. Combined, the ratings for these questions make up the overall performance score, which is measured on a 100-point scale. The questions are organized into six customer experience pillars—culture, loyalty, operations, product, relationship, and value.

To supplement the customer satisfaction data gathered with the standard evaluation, KLAS also created a supplemental evaluation to delve deeper into several questions specific to the patient access market. This evaluation asked customer respondents (1) which patient access functionalities from their enterprise EMR vendor are the strongest/weakest, (2) how well positioned third-party vendors are to address various patient access needs, and (3) how well positioned their EMR vendor is to address various patient access needs.

Some respondents choose not to answer particular questions, meaning the sample size for any given vendor or solution can change from question to question. When the number of unique organization responses for a particular question is less than 15, the score for that question is marked with an asterisk (*) or otherwise designated as “limited data.” If the sample size is less than 6, no score is shown. Note that when a vendor has a low number of reporting sites, the possibility exists for KLAS scores to change significantly as new surveys are collected.