EHR Market Drivers

Introduction

There are many factors and influences driving the EHR market. The market is struggling to transition from its two decade "early adopter" phase and become a professional market where physicians can purchase with confidence based on verifiable information about products and vendors. At the beginning of this phase there are 300 plus companies developing EHR or CPM products, vying for physician attention and market share. Of these, only 15 have established widespread physician brand identity. It has been publicly stated by the Medical Research Institute that ~100,000 physicians will purchase EHR systems within the next 24 months. If this is true, the market share of EHR vendors with high brand recognition will soar, and the shares of many, perhaps the majority of less-well-known EHR vendors will plummet, independent of the quality, advanced technology or cost-effectiveness of their systems. Within 5 years, Medical Strategic Planning, Inc. forecasts that the number of viable EHR developers remaining in the market will have contracted to about 75. The key is determining which 75 will remain. We believe that they will be among the EHR developers that are self-disclosing about systems features, developers you will find in the Andrew & Associates EHR and Workflow Management surveys. Of course, other "analysts" may have other conclusions.

Assuring Electronic Record Portability

One important consideration is the assurance that patient records that are converted to electronic representations and stored in an EHR can be easily extracted from that EHR and loaded into another one, should the group practice wish to change vendors or should an installed vendor "fail" in the market. The inability to make such a transition is referred to as "vendor lock" and is a major risk factor and concern of physician group practices that are considering converting their records to some electronic format, but are afraid they will end up in a non-transferrable, proprietary, legacy format.

The Continuity of Care Record - Shortly To Become An International, ASTM Standard

The pending confirmation and adoption of the second ballot on the continuity of care record (CCR) standard offers great hope to physician group practices facing and fearing "vendor lock", as every major EHR developer by mid-2006 should be offering an EHR product that can WRITE OUT all patient encounters as a group of CCR-compliant records. By mid-2007, every major EHR developer should be offering EHR systems that can READ IN any CCR record and populate its internal EHR datastructure with the data the CCR contains. While the CCR does not capture and report ALL data that is contained in an EHR system, it gets perhaps 90% of the critical information that would need to be transferred from one (discontinued) EHR system to another (replacement) EHR system, and represents the first, international standard that potentially releases physican groups from EHR developer-specific "locks" on patient information stored within proprietary EHR data structures. It represents in many ways the "Roseta Stone" of patient encounters stored electronically. Every physician group contemplating the purchase of an EHR today should demand and write into their purchase specification and documents the ability to both WRITE out and READ in CCR-compliant data.