I recently starting running across an EMR website called EMR Edge – Electronic Medical Record Review and Rating. When I went to the website I was impressed by the sites design and some of the ideas they were showing on the site. In fact, the site even said at the top that it is “The Cutting Edge of the electronic medical record.”
Having this website I was of course interested in what other people were doing. I was particularly interested in the rating system they had going on since I’m interested in doing some sort of EMR rating/review in the future(yes, I have been saying this for a while).
My first sign that the site was outdated was when I saw the top 5 user rated EMR companies:
OmniMD, Practice Velocity EMR, SmartEMR, TouchWorks EMR, Accuchart
I’d heard of 2 of the 5 and the top rated EMR didn’t even have an image for it. It certainly made me wonder how good this site was. I will acknowledge that just because I haven’t heard of an EMR doesn’t mean they couldn’t be great. You’ve seen my list of EMR systems and so I definitely don’t know them all. However, I believe I’ve at least heard of most of the finest ones.
Regardless, as I surfed the rest of the site I realized that the site wasn’t being updated and in the list of 200 EMR systems only a quarter of them had been rated at all. The only article ever posted was over a year old and the EMR forum hadn’t been used in a long time and barely had any content.
It just amazes me that a website that looks so good could be so dissappointing. It also makes me wonder how many people have used that website to make a decision on an EMR product because of some ratings that could be very old and were hundreds of releases ago. I can feel the website developers pain. Keeping track of 200 EMR companies is practically impossible. My guess is that most EMR systems are able to put out at least 2 major releases a year. That’s why I haven’t tried to rate/review EMR systems YET. I’m sure I’ll find a way to start some day.
In the end, I think their website is mostly a nice marketing tool for them to find people interested in purchasing an EMR. I hope their emr consulting service is better updated than their website. If it is then I give them my admiration for creating a great marketing tool for an EMR consultant.
