Four years after what Black Book calls the “replacement frenzy,” a recent survey from the market research firm indicates that 87 percent of financially struggling hospitals now regret changing their EHR systems.
Among the difficulties the survey highlighted were higher than expected costs, layoffs, declining inpatient revenues, disenfranchised clinicians and doubts over the benefits of switching systems.
The survey, which polled 1,204 hospital executives and 2,133 IT staff users, found that 14 percent of all hospitals that replaced their original EHR since 2011 were losing inpatient revenue at a pace that wouldn’t support the total cost of their replacement EHR.
“It was a risky decision as hospitals were facing the fact that they would not be back to their pre-EHR implementation patient volumes, inpatient or ambulatory, for at least another five years,” said Doug Brown, managing partner of Black Book, in a statement.
