More Electronic Health Record Systems Than You Imagined

Joseph Conn | ModernHealthcare.com | July 19, 2012

I had no idea. There is simply a horde, a herd, a whole Wild West stampede of electronic health-record systems out there. Anyone who's wandered the showroom floor at a Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society convention knows there are tons of health information technology companies. There were upwards of 1,100 exhibitors this year.

But earlier this month, Jodi Daniel, director of the Office of Policy and Research within the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, presented a slide at an Health Information Technology Policy Committee meeting with some health IT market numbers that I found nothing short of astonishing.

Believe it or not, according to Daniel, there are 613 "complete" electronic health record systems and 399 "modular" systems that have been tested and certified for use in the federal EHR incentive payment program in the ambulatory-care market alone.
There are another 87 complete and 378 modular EHR systems for inpatient venues.
All totaled, as of July 5, there were 816 different EHR vendors offering 1,477 "unique" certified products on the ONC's official Certified Health IT Product List, from which Daniel drew her incredible numbers.

Chase Titensor is a researcher and data analyst for KLAS Enterprises who worked on his company's latest report on the ambulatory EHR market released earlier this week. We talked Thursday and when I asked what surprised him most from the research for the report this year, it was just how large and increasingly diverse, the ambulatory EHR market is...