What You Should Know:
– New KLAS report finds acute and ambulatory care EMR vendors Cerner, Epic and NextGen are best at making outside patient data usable for clinicians (data from outside the clinician’s health system).
– KLAS report examines adoption and usability among advanced users of the main acute and ambulatory care EMR vendors.
The national interoperability networks of Carequality and CommonWell Health Alliance have become some of the primary means by which patient records are shared between healthcare organizations in the US. Despite progress in delivering interoperability, the number of providers connected to these plug-and-play networks, and the usability of the shared data varies significantly depending on the EMR in use. The KLAS report, Interoperability 2020 (Acute/Ambulatory) examines adoption and usability among advanced users of the main acute and ambulatory care EMR vendors.
Epic, NextGen, Cerner Best at Making Outside Patient Data Usable
The report reveals Cerner, Epic and NextGen are the best acute/ambulatory EMR vendors at making outside patient data usable for clinicians (data from outside the clinician’s health system). Epic continued to enhance the end-user experience with its Happy Together solution delivering the most natural integration of outside data into the clinician workflow, including the recent addition of basic lab trending.
KLAS named NextGen as the only ambulatory specific EMR vendor to provide a strong usability experience for all interoperability workflows, while Cerner customers validated its strong capabilities for accessing and incorporating a wide variety of outside data into the patient record.
Duplicate PAMI Data a Growing Problem
Customers of both Cerner and Epic say the next step is for the vendors to reduce the duplication of problems, allergies, medications, and immunizations (PAMI).
NextGen Healthcare is the only vendor whose customers report significant improvement in this area. The NextGen EMR is able to filter out duplicate medications, even for inexact matches (e.g., Tylenol vs. acetaminophen). While other solutions may be capable of flagging duplicate information and removing some of it, customers say the process is often still very manual.
Other key findings of the report include:
– athenahealth and Epic continue to lead in overall adoption, with nearly all customers connected to CommonWell Health Alliance network.
– Cerner has been encouraging customers to adopt the CommonWell connection for some time, and over the past 18 months, the number of customers live has doubled, meaning a majority of clients are now connected.
– NextGen Healthcare has also continued to advocate for the adoption of Carequality among its customer base.
– eClinicalWorks customers have been actively connecting; their usability experience remains similar to what it was in the past.
– Since early 2019, many organizations have implemented Expanse, but the adoption of CommonWell among MEDITECH customers has increased only slightly (from two customers to eleven).
– Allscripts was a founding member of CommonWell in 2013 but never connected. After multiple delays and a shift to Carequality, they connected their first customer (via dbMotion) in the second half of 2020.
