Together, the top four have sold 1,214 hospitals a complete, inpatient EHR system, or 58.6% of all systems sold to hospitals that have received Medicare EHR incentive payment money using a complete, inpatient EHR. The top 10 developers of these systems have sold them to 1,902 hospitals and captured nearly 92% of this market niche. In all, 35 developers or vendors have had at least one of these complete, inpatient EHR systems carry a hospital across the meaningful-use finish line, the federal data show.
Providing clear evidence that the “best-of-breed” approach to creating a hospital information technology system is still a popular strategy, an even greater number of hospitals—2,438—have achieved meaningful use under the Medicare EHR incentive payment program using modular, inpatient systems. These modular systems have been produced by 79 different developers or vendors.
Three developers lead the hospital, modular, inpatient EHRs segment, according to federal data.
At No. 1 is Meditech, with 637 hospitals or 26.1% of those hospitals using a modular, inpatient EHR to achieve Medicare meaningful use, followed by No. 2, Cerner, 530 hospitals, 21.7%; and No. 3, HCA Information & Technology Services, the health IT arm of the Hospital Corporation of America, 274, 11.2%. Combined, these top three control 59.1% of the hospital, modular, inpatient EHR market niche.
A much more limited number of hospitals—51 in total—have receive Medicare EHR incentive payments for using complete and modular systems in the ambulatory care setting, the federal data shows.
Most of it went to 11 developers or vendors of hospital, complete EHR systems for ambulatory care, led by CPSI and Epic, both with 13 hospitals, and 28.9% of this market niche, and the Indian Health Service, which equips hospitals with its home-grown EHR called the Resource and Patient Management System, or RPMS, a derivative of the Veterans Affairs Department's VistA EHR, with 7 hospitals and 15.6%.
Combined, these three developers account for 73.3% of the EHR installations in the hospital, complete EHR, ambulatory payment niche.
In addition, six hospitals, all Cerner customers, have received Medicare EHR incentive program payments for modular EHRs used in ambulatory care.
Data used in this analysis—from nearly 151,200 records of meaningful users—is from a joint database kept by the CMS and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at HHS. The database does not include information on EHR systems or hospitals paid under the Medicaid portion of the EHR incentive payment program. Both the Medicare and Medicaid EHR incentive programs were created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
