Health IT

KLAS: Users are lukewarm about population health tools from Epic, Cerner and other EHR vendors

A new report from KLAS highlights what healthcare professionals think of various population health management solutions. Let's just say Allscripts, athenahealth, Cerner, eClinicalWorks and Epic didn't have the greatest user satisfaction scores.

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A new KLAS report dives deeper into what healthcare professionals think of various population health management solutions.

To gather user feedback, KLAS held a 2016 meeting attended by leaders from provider organizations, payers, services firms and health IT vendors. In late 2017, the company took the gleaned information and published a report focused on the functionality of certain solutions. A second and more recently released report focuses on vendor performance.

As it turns out, the hottest names in the EHR world didn’t have the greatest scores in the world.

The population health tools from five well-known EHR vendors — Allscripts, athenahealth, Cerner, eClinicalWorks and Epic — only garnered average (or sometimes quite poor) satisfaction from users.

They were rarely among the top performers in any of the evaluation categories, which included data aggregation, data analysis, care management, admin/financial reporting, patient engagement and clinician engagement.

Of those five vendors, Allscripts seemed to earn the best satisfaction score from users. eClinicalWorks had the lowest satisfaction score.

Particularly in the data aggregation and data analysis categories, vendors like Epic and eClinicalWorks leave much to be desired. Cerner offers more niche functionality, but clients said they want a bit more guidance.

Why the mediocre scores?

“This is partly because customers’ needs increase in complexity as broader deployment is achieved,” according to KLAS.

Despite such lackluster feedback, users had a few positive things to say about EHR vendors’ pop health solutions. Tools from eClinicalWorks and Epic are valuable in that they help drive clinician engagement. Allscripts customers were pleased with the solution’s care management capabilities, and athenahealth was highlighted for its portal.

The KLAS report also touched on the vendors that received higher user satisfaction scores.

Integrated delivery networks and clinically integrated networks were particularly pleased with a few companies: Health Catalyst, Arcadia and Philips Wellcentive. These three vendors performed well in the data-focused categories. In particular, Health Catalyst’s strong suit is developing new tools and working closely with customers. Philips Wellcentive and Arcadia offer a breadth of analytics functionality.

ACOs and small hospitals tend to value vendors like HealthEC and Forward Health Group for population health management solutions. Lightbeam and NextGen Healthcare (EagleDream Health) also did well, though the feedback came from smaller sample sizes. These four vendors performed strongly in the data-focused categories.

As far as the clinician engagement category is concerned, Forward Health Group and Enli were the vendors that did the best. Health Catalyst, Philips Wellcentive and IBM Watson Health were the lowest performers.

Photo: nito100, Getty Images

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