When It Comes To Meaningful Use, Some Vendors May Have An Edge

A new article appearing in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association has concluded that while EHRs certified under the meaningful use program should perform more or less equally, they don’t.

After conducting an analysis, researchers found that there were significant associations between specific vendors and level of hospital performance for all six meaningful use criteria they were using as a yardstick. Epic came out on top by this measure, demonstrating significantly higher performance on five of the six criteria.

However, it’s also worth noting that EHR vendor choice by hospitals accounted for anywhere between 7% and 34% of performance variation across the six meaningful use criteria. In other words, researchers found that at least in some cases, EHR performance was influenced as much by the fit between platform and hospital as the platform itself.

To conduct the study, researchers used recent national data on certified EHR vendors hospitals and implemented, along with hospital performance on six meaningful use criteria. They sought to find out:

  • Whether certain vendors were found more frequently among the highest performing hospitals, as measured by performance on Stage 2 meaningful use criteria;
  • Whether the relationship between vendor and hospital performance was consistent across the meaningful use criteria, or whether vendors specialized in certain areas; and
  • What proportion of variation in performance across hospitals could be explained by the vendor characteristics

To measure the performance of various vendors, the researchers chose six core stage two meaningful use criteria, including 60% of medication orders entered using CPOE;  providing 50% of patients with the ability to view/download/transmit their health information; for 50% of patients received from another setting or care provider, medication reconciliation is performed; for 50% of patient transitions to another setting or care provider, a summary of care record is provided; and for 10% of patient transitions to another setting or care provider, a summary of care record is electronically transmitted.

After completing their analysis, researchers found that three hospitals were in the top performance quartile for all meaningful use criteria, and all used Epic. Of the 17 hospitals in the top performance quartile for five criteria, 15 used Epic, one used MEDITECH and one another smaller vendor. Among the 68 hospitals in the top quartile for four criteria, 64.7% used Epic, 11.8% used Cerner and 8.8% used MEDITECH.

When it came to hospitals that were not in the top quartile for any of the criteria, there was no overwhelming connection between vendor and results. For the 355 hospitals in this category, 28.7% used MEDITECH, 25.1% used McKesson, 20.3% used Cerner, 14.4% used MEDHOST and 6.8% used Epic.

All of this being said, the researchers noted that news the hospital characteristics nor the vendor choice explained were then a small amount of the performance variation they saw. This won’t surprise anybody who’s seen firsthand how much other issues, notably human factors, can change the outcome of processes like these.

It’s also worth noting that there might be other causes for these differences. For example, if you can afford the notably expensive Epic systems, then your hospital and health system could likely afford to invest in meaningful use compliance as well. This added investment could explain hospitals meaningful use performance as much as EHR choice.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

1 Comment

  • Most of the EHR/EMR’S today are decent; we’re they not, they would have been vanquished through lack of robustness.
    Each had it’s own adv/disadv’s.
    The system chosen, must mirror the type of healthcare business that one is working and providing services in.
    No one system, can ever have it “all”, as everythg in life is a compromise.

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