Despite the COVID-19 pandemic wreaking havoc on hospital operations, EHR purchasing activity saw an uptick in 2020. Epic, for example, saw its most successful year since 2015, when the company landed contracts with 144 hospitals, according to the KLAS Research "U.S. Hospital Market Share 2021" report.
Here are 12 things to know about the EHR market and top vendors:
- KLAS named Epic its 2021 Best in KLAS Overall Software Suite, the 11th year in a row the company has earned the distinction.
- More small standalone hospitals switched to Cerner than any other EHR company. Nineteen such hospitals inked contracts with Cerner, while Meditech landed nine. CPSI, Epic and Azalea Health landed seven, four and two, respectively.
- CPSI lost 22 hospital contracts, 20 of which were competitive — that is, those hospitals switched from CPSI to other EHR companies because of a new contract. The remaining two CPSI losses were from EHR standardization of single hospitals within larger health systems.
- Cerner suffered the most contract losses with 59 — 51 of which were competitive, with the remaining eight coming from health system standardization.
- Epic lost only three hospital contracts in 2020, all of them from standardization efforts stemming from mergers and acquisitions.
EHR companies ended 2020 with the following number of contracted hospitals:
- Epic: 1,713
- Cerner: 1,354
- Meditech: 901
- CPSI: 503
- Allscripts: 271
- Medhost: 179
- Azalea Health: 26