Web-based EHRs keep gaining ground

I wrote Wednesday about the new ambulatory electronic health-record system survey report from the National Center for Health Statistics, and I want to elaborate today on what I think was a key finding from it.

According to the survey, 41% of the 55% of office-based physicians who use an EHR now use a Web-based EHR system.

Unfortunately, the NCHS didn't ask in previous surveys about they type of systems docs used, so the NCHS has no apples-to-apples comparison of the growth of Web-based systems over time, according to researcher Eric Jamoom, lead author of the agency's latest report.

So, let's go to the archive and piece together a partial growth chart from stories about previous surveys.

Consider back in 2007, when the American Osteopathic Association surveyed its members on health IT use. That survey, conducted on the group's behalf by the Medical Group Management Association, found that nearly 21% of D.O.s were using Web-based systems. (As an aside, the osteopaths surveyed reported using 113 different EHR systems, with no one vendor achieving as much as a 6% market share. I mention that because yesterday, a report from KLAS Enterprises found that the ambulatory EHR market is still wide open, with no dominant vendor or group of vendors across all practices sizes. I'll be writing more about that and an interview I just did with the guy who crunched the numbers for that KLAS report in a blog post soon.)

In 2010, an earlier KLAS report revealed that one-third of all ambulatory practices were considering purchasing EHRs that use a software-as-a-service delivery model. A forerunner of SaaS, the "application service provider," or ASP, system was heavily hyped in the dot-com heyday.

The latest NCHS survey numbers indicate that Web-based EHRs have yet to attain the dominance in the office-based physician market that their developers were claiming as their inevitable due back 12 years ago when I started writing about health IT.

It seems clear, though, that physician resistance to these systems has waned. The Web is winning. Resistance is futile.

Follow Joseph Conn on Twitter: @MHJConn.