KLAS: Multispecialty Organizations Grapple With EMR Functionality Gaps

Although a patchwork of best-of-breed systems might result in high clinician satisfaction scores, inpatient and large physician group leaders face significant challenges in balancing clinician demands with the realities of implementing, interfacing, and supporting each solution, according to a new KLAS report — Ambulatory EMR by Specialty Study 2012: Finding the Fit.

The report examines how EMR vendors tackle each of their varied specialties, both as an enterprise offering and by individual specialty, and looks at the capability and performance of the measured vendors, highlighting where they excel and where they fall short when it comes to specialty content delivery and multispecialty coverage.

“Vendors strive to meet providers’ needs and reach the specialty EMR promised land by offering a solution that provides the fewest gaps with the best support for the broadest number of specialties,” said research director Mark Wagner. “Providers also want a solid solution for the critical, high-revenue, and high-volume specialties; strong ambulatory/inpatient data exchange, whether through native EMR integration or HL7 interfaces; and clean code releases built on top of dependable applications that work in tandem with reliable customer support.”

This report is divided into two sections: Inpatient & Large Group Analysis and Specialty Insights & Key Players. Inpatient & Large Group Analysis examines vendors that provide broad coverage of specialties and are frequently scored by inpatient environments, including Allscripts (Enterprise), Cerner (PowerChart), eClinicalWorks, Epic (EpicCare), GE Healthcare (Centricity EMR), and NextGen (EMR). Individual Specialty Insights & Key Players explores solutions that represent high-volume and/or high-revenue specialties, including vendors like Amazing Charts, Aprima, athenahealth, e-MDs, Greenway, PCC, Praxis, SRSsoft, and Vitera (Sage).

The overall scores by specialty demonstrate the relative degree of difficulty for meeting the needs of each specialty. Areas including internal medicine, family medicine, and pediatrics yielded the highest scores, while nephrology, oncology, and ophthalmology garnered the lowest scores.