News | October 12, 2015

Insights From EHR Software Users

By Megan Williams, contributing writer

As electronic health records (EHR) purchasing and implementation levels out, it’s important to keep an eye out for more subtle, but still impactful changes that are going on in the segment. To keep you on top on things, here are insights from Capterra’s EHR Software Industry User Report, a survey of 400 U.S. healthcare professionals who use EHR software:

  • The majority of office physicians (78 percent) use basic electronic medical records (EMR) as of 2013; more than 80 percent of hospitals used EHR in 2014.
  • Only 7 percent of respondents are dissatisfied with their EHR, and looking only at that group of respondents, 89 percent are dissatisfied because of a lack of features and usability, and only 12 percent are dissatisfied over poor support or price.
  • The top five most requested features of EHR are voice recognition (29 percent of those surveyed), mobile integration/app (14 percent), 3M or other medical dictionary (14 percent), telemedicine capabilities (11 percent), and marketing functionality (10 percent).
  • The most used EHR features are patient portal (32 percent), appointment booking (30 percent), patient reminders/alerts (29 percent), specialty-specific charts (29 percent), and physician scheduling (26 percent). Conversely, the survey revealed only about half the facilities that have the ability to bill and submit claims from their EHR systems actually use this function. The survey also revealed a general lack of awareness about the features their EHR actually has — pointing to a need for effective software training.
  • EHR software costs an average of $117,672 per year, approximately $30,000 more than respondents anticipated. (Read about overcoming EHR objections here.)
  • Of those surveyed, 59 percent reported they implemented their systems in less than six months. For about 14 percent, the process took one year or more.

The report also reported challenges EHR software industry still needs to overcome, for example, most EHR software isn’t Web based and it’s difficult to share health records between different systems.

To review the full report, click here.