Patient Engagement Ecosystem 2021
How Has the Industry Progressed?

GetWellNetwork, Vocera, Salesforce & CipherHealth Show Large Capability Growth through Development & Acquisitions

GetWellNetwork, Vocera, Salesforce, and CipherHealth have seen some of the largest increases in their reported capabilities since KLAS’ 2019 patient engagement ecosystem study. Common areas of development for these vendors include virtual visit and triage/symptom-checker functionality accelerated by COVID-19. GetWellNetwork—in addition to further developing their Inpatient, Rounds+, and Loop products and the Anywhere mobile app—recently acquired Docent Health, expanding their consumer engagement capabilities. GetWellNetwork offers one of the broadest capability sets in the market and reports deep adoption. They have also added tools to guide patients to care and include family members in the care process. Vocera acquired the Ease product in late 2020 to improve the care experience for patients and families. They have increased customers’ ability to reach out to patients via appointment reminders and pre-visit broadcast messaging. Salesforce has continued to leverage a strong partnership approach with other vendors while also offering native capabilities to solve many patient engagement challenges. Most of Salesforce’s capability growth since 2019 has centered on pre-visit capabilities, such as patients’ abilities to find a provider, schedule an appointment, and self-register/check in. CipherHealth, historically focused on post-visit engagement and rounding, has grown mostly through developing new pre-visit capabilities for self-scheduling and self-registration, along with family/caregiver collaboration capabilities. Change Healthcare, Jellyfish Health, and HealthBanks have also reported significant growth (with the caveat that KLAS has spoken to <6 of their customers to date).

Epic, Allscripts & R1 Report Broadest Capabilities among Health System–Focused Vendors

In addition to previously highlighted CipherHealth, Salesforce, and GetWellNetwork, Epic, Allscripts, and R1 (all used most often by acute care organizations, though not exclusively) stand out for offering a broad range of capabilities. With deep adoption across the board, Epic’s functionality-rich MyChart, MyChart Bedside, and CRM products provide broad capabilities that span the continuum of care. Allscripts’ FollowMyHealth solution is used in both ambulatory and acute care organizations. The vendor continues to report broad capabilities, though reported customer adoption is not as deep as that of other broad-capability vendors. Allscripts has some gaps around certain in-room inpatient capabilities and social media tools. R1—focused on revenue cycle and patient access—reports offering nearly all platform capabilities (minus telemedicine and prescription refill requests) through both self-developed tools and the acquisitions of SCI Solutions and Tonic (primarily for pre-visit capabilities). Many other provider-centric capabilities (acute care and ambulatory) are still on R1’s development road map; in-room capabilities are not offered by R1 today.

For Ambulatory Practices, athenahealth, NextGen Healthcare, Luma Health & Mend Offer Broadest Patient Engagement Capabilities 

Though ambulatory organizations tend to have less extensive patient engagement needs than their acute care counterparts, vendors that focus on the ambulatory setting tend to offer most core platform capabilities. Outside of the core platform capabilities, these vendors often offer fewer than half of other capabilities. Across vendors, common gaps include care-setting guidance and price transparency/patient estimations. athenahealth has been validated for 11 of the 12 platform capabilities and reports deep customer adoption across many communication and portal-centric capabilities, such as bill pay and prescription refill requests. NextGen Healthcare, who acquired Medfusion in late 2019, is also validated for 11 platform capabilities—their only non-validated capability is provider search/matching, and NextGen Healthcare reports it is on their road map. Depth of adoption across their customer base is moderate. Physician messaging and prescription refill requests are most commonly adopted. EMR-agnostic Luma Health was validated for broad capabilities in KLAS’ 2020 Patient Engagement Platforms report and, in particular, offers many capabilities centered on communication and patient outreach. Online bill pay and prescription refill requests, Luma Health’s biggest gaps, are offered through third parties. Mend’s offering has some of the deepest customer adoption; the vendor augments their strong telehealth technology with tools that help engage and involve patients (e.g., scheduling, check-in, reminders).

Vendors Not Yet Measured in Patient Engagement

A number of other vendors are also on KLAS’ radar for patient engagement and shared information about their customer bases, capabilities, and customer adoption. To date, KLAS does not yet have enough customer feedback on these vendors to measure their performance in patient engagement. As KLAS continues to interview these vendors’ clients, vendor-reported capabilities will be further validated.

INDUSTRY PROGRESS

Unsurprisingly, the market was flooded with telehealth capabilities over the last year, and more than half of measured vendors now offer them, compared to just over one-third in 2019. Additionally, because of the need to reduce physical touchpoints with patients during COVID-19, many vendors developed self-scheduling and self-registration capabilities.

Patient Engagement Capabilities Index

About This Report

This report is designed to give payer and provider organizations a clear picture of what capabilities vendors offer to meet their core patient engagement needs. Most data in this report comes from vendor-reported information.

However, a limited amount of KLAS performance data is also shared. Overall scores are measured on a 100-point scale and represent the weighted average of several yes/no questions as well as other questions scored on a 9-point scale. A vendor’s sample size for performance data may not reach KLAS’ required threshold of 15 unique respondents; when a vendor’s sample size is less than 15, their score is marked with an asterisk (*) or otherwise designated as “limited data.” If the sample size is less than 6, no score is shown. In these cases, vendors are marked throughout the report as “not yet measured in patient engagement.”