Allscipts Views on KLAS Conflict of Interest

HISTalk posted an interesting comment from Allscripts about KLAS and why Allscripts stopped working with KLAS to rate their EHR software:

We agree that there is a conflict of interest in having vendors pay large fees to the same company that is producing the ratings. We reached the same conclusion a few years ago and discontinued the practice. After our recent merger with Eclipsys, we inherited an existing Eclipsys contract that was in place with KLAS, so the information reported by the writer was technically correct. However, we have now canceled that contract and we do not currently pay KLAS anything. We realize that is counter-intuitive as we currently are and have consistently been highly rated across many product categories by KLAS, but ultimately we didn’t feel it was right to pay a firm that was also rating our products.

I’ve never really understood why so many people have put so much value in KLAS. I’ve never found it to be that value (at least on the EHR rating side).

The problem is that SOOO many people are looking for a source of information on how to rate and rank the various EHR vendors. They’re looking for some way to differentiate the 300+ EMR companies out there. Unfortunately, there’s no ranking, certification, JD Power like or consumer report like service that does this for EHR software.

I think there’s a huge opportunity there, but it’s a nearly impossible task to do it effectively (ie. it provides value to the doctors) and without any sort of conflict of interest. Thus we end up with services like KLAS.

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John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

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