Small hospitals with fewer than 150 beds are increasingly turning to clinical information systems (CIS) from vendors that have primarily served larger medical facilities, a shift that has a lot to do with meeting meaningful use marks.
That's the conclusion of a Nov. 3 report from the research group KLAS, which noted small hospitals historically have used vendors focused on the community hospital market.
Clinical information systems include information technology that is applied at the point of care, such as electronic medical records, clinical data repositories, decision support programs, and communication tools such as electronic messaging systems.
Now smaller hospitals are considering buying these systems from firms including Meditech, Cerner, McKesson Paragon, and Epic more often than from traditional community hospital-focused CIS vendors such as CPSI, Healthland, Healthcare Management Systems Inc., Keane, and Siemens (for its MedSeries4 system), according to the KLAS report.
"Most large hospitals have already chosen a CIS, so community hospitals represent the largest potential client pool for vendors," said Jason Hess, general manager of clinical research at KLAS and author of the new report.
And with meaningful use requirements approaching, "providers don't seem to be considering community vendors as much," he said.
Meditech is the most-considered vendor in community hospitals, but Cerner's hosted system is making inroads, and McKesson's Paragon is steadily gathering provider interest, according to the report. To a lesser extent, Epic's Mindshare is also growing in the community market.
The researchers found that Meditech is considered most often in small hospitals (1-150 beds), Cerner in mid-sized hospitals (151-300 beds), and Epic in large hospitals (over 300 beds). All three are receiving frequent consideration from hospitals of all sizes.
