Epic Systems Corp. is an early leader among a broad field of for-profit companies, providers and not-for-profit organizations developing electronic health-record systems used by physicians and other "eligible professionals" as well as by hospitals that have received federal incentive payments, recently released federal data show.
Few EHR vendors dominate payments
Through November, Verona, Wis.-based Epic had 6,045 eligible professionals using its EHRs who had received payments under either the Medicare or Medicaid EHR incentive programs, according to a database released by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology earlier this week.
The database is a mash-up of the ONC's official list of tested and certified EHR systems and the CMS' list of Medicare and Medicaid program enrollees that have been paid after either attesting that they have met the Stage 1 meaningful-use requirements under Medicare or have adopted, upgraded or implemented a certified system under Medicare. The ONC list includes both "complete EHR" systems and so-called modular EHR components.
The new data set contains the records of 21,697 providers, de-identified by provider but including the EHR developer's name, EHR product name and version, the provider's state, whether the provider used a complete or modular EHR, and whether payment was received through the Medicare or Medicaid programs or both—as well as other data.
Epic was the EHR of choice for 6,045 physicians and other eligible professionals, grabbing a 28% market share of the eligible-professionals segment, a slice larger than that of the next four vendors combined. Those others in the top five, in rank order, are eClinicalWorks, 1,847 (9%); Allscripts, 1,449 (7%); Athenahealth, 1,158 (5%); and Community Computer Service, 999 (5%). These top five vendors claimed 54% of the market of early adopters and meaningful users. The top 10 vendors also claimed 71% of the incentive payments thus far. But it's still a wide-open market.
The database lists 217 EHR vendors as having products that had been used successfully by at least one eligible professional to either achieve meaningful use or receive incentive payments under Medicaid. Of those 217 developers, 131, or 60%, had 10 or fewer installations.
Epic also led among hospitals that received federal incentive payments for using a complete EHR, but the privately held company was not nearly so dominant in this indicator of the hospital IT market as it was in the EP segment.
According to federal data, there were 627 hospitals that have been paid using complete EHRs developed by 22 different companies or organizations. Of them, 165 were Epic customers, 26% of that niche. Ranked second was Computer Programs and Systems, commonly known as CPSI, used by 140 hospitals (22%), followed by Cerner Corp., 71 (11%); Healthland, 54 (9%); and Meditech, 47 (7%).
Data analysis by Modern Healthcare.
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