KLAS Reports on Commercial EHR Systems

Bernie Monegain | Healthcare IT News | June 6, 2013

A new KLAS report, its first on ambulatory electronic medical record usability, finds that success in achieving high usability ranges from 85 percent to 55 percent. Of the EMR vendors reviewed, athenahealth ranked No. 1.

The KLAS report, Ambulatory EMR Usability 2013: More Nurture than Nature, reveals where the pain points are for providers and what they are doing to address them.

The products reviewed in the report include Allscripts Enterprise, athenahealth, Cerner, eClincialWorks, Epic, GE Healthcare CPS, Greenway, McKesson Practice Partner and NextGen.

As part of this study, KLAS conducted more than 163 interviews with physician leadership from groups with more than 25 physicians to determine the performance for each of the vendors as well as the contributing elements behind each of the ratings.

Open Health News' Take: 

It would be nice to also have KLAS look at OpenEMR, not just proprietary systems. As of December 1, 2012, OpenEMR recorded 198,042 downloads of OpenEMR from the SourceForge project page. A news release also noted that there have been an additional 10,000 downloads from the OEMR organization's web site for a total of about 210,000 downloads. OEMR estimates that there are more than 5,000 installations of OpenEMR in physician offices and other small healthcare facilities across the U.S. Conservatively speaking, that translates into more than 15,000 physicians using the system as they treat almost 30 million patients. Numerous small companies provide support for OpenEMR. See http://www.openhealthnews.com/hotnews/openemr-continues-grow-popularity-and-use  -  Peter Groen, Senior Editor, OHNews