Since April 2011 and November, eligible professionals and hospitals have completed 722,675 meaningful use attestations using a variety of certified EHR technology across two stages of the Medicare EHR Incentive Program. (As a comparison, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation puts the number of professional active physicians in the United States at 905,061 as of January 2016.)
Of these meaningful use attestations, 652 EHR and health IT vendors play a key part in ensuring that the data collection and reporting process led to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) disbursing more than $20 billion on the Medicare program alone.
While the number of EHR and health IT vendors exceeded 650, it doesn’t address the more significant role played by a much smaller number of CEHRT vendors, especially top EHR companies.
Using data pulled from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology Health IT Dashboard, here’s a closer look at the EHR and health IT vendors featuring over the two stages and five years of meaningful use.*
Editor’s note: ONC maintains stores of health IT-related data for the US.
This subset of information combines meaningful use attestation data with specific details about CEHRT used by eligible providers to demonstrate meaningful use successfully as part of the Medicare EHR Incentive Program. The unique number of eligibles providers by National Provider Identifier (NPI) were 308,701 EPs to 4545 EHs.
Let’s start with hospitals, which began meaningful use earlier because of requirements for these eligible providers to report according to the fiscal calendar ending in September. According to data, the leader in hospital meaningful use attestations was MEDITECH (760), followed by Cerner Corporation (685) and Epic Systems (671) neck-in-neck.
The remaining EHR vendors based on unique NPIs and attestations by hospitals were as follows:
- CPSI (450)
- McKesson (409)
- MEDHOST (222)
- Healthland (229)
- Allscripts (145)
Given how much smaller the hospital market is in total number of physicians, there were predictably fewer players in the space.
As for EPs and their success at attesting for meaningful use, they came to rely on different EHR vendors than those contracted by EHs, some similar and others not so much. Still, atop the EP meaningful use attestation table, one EHR company appears to outstripped the competition.
While Epic often makes headlines for its work with major health systems and hospitals, its reach appears much larger, extending out to the ambulatory side of healthcare. The EHR company is listed as a CEHRT vendor in 61,192 meaningful use attestations by EPs.
A few lengths ahead of the peloton was Allscripts in 31,984 attestations. The EHR vendor was out in front of a rather competitive group of competitors:
- eCW (21913 EPs)
- NextGen Healthcare (19461 EPs)
- GE Healthcare (16566 EPs)
- Greenway Health (12387 EPs)
Coming in behind were several EHR vendors whose performance was still head and shoulders above the rest:
- Cerner (9917 EPs)
- athenahealth (9543 EPs)
- Practice Fusion (8470 EPs)
The evolution of Stage 2 likely played a major role in affecting the ability of eligible providers to demonstrate meaningful use — ranging from a lack of EHR vendor readiness to regulatory modifications to Stage 2 requirements.
Those who haven’t yet attested for meaningful use in 2015 still have six weeks before the deadline for completing meaningful use attestation. How many that is remains to be seen as well as the ability of CMS systems to handle a large volume of hospitals and physicians.
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