- Successful PACS Vendors Support Customers, Embrace Advancements
The report generally found that many of the smaller vendors outperformed the enterprise vendors when it came to user satisfaction.
“Physicians often feel that the best-of-breed systems have been better designed and tailored to fit the emergency department,” report authors explained. “Despite this, shifts in healthcare IT have influenced many provider organizations to look primarily toward ED solutions from enterprise vendors that can better fit into the continuum of care.”
“Provider organizations are demanding greater efficiency from their EDIS vendors as they work to improve patient satisfaction and the quality of (value-based) care,” report authors continued. “EDIS vendors are expected to continue to develop their solutions to meet clinicians’ needs and expectations for usability that promotes efficiency and allows doctors to deliver care in the best way possible.”
KLAS structured the report as best-of-breed versus enterprise EDISs and focused on the improvements each vendor has made over the years and how clinicians reacted to them.
Best-of-breed vendors Wellsoft, T-Systems, Picis, and MEDHOST are guiding usability innovations, according to the report. Enterprise vendors, Epic, Cerner, Allscripts, and MEDITECH show what is possible for delivering a more efficient workflow.
Best-of-breed solutions are losing traction, the report found. This is in despite of how much clinicians liked using them because they don’t offer the same integration capabilities as the larger enterprise solutions. Organizations are generally focused more on infrastructure integration and interoperability over workflow efficiency.
Forty-two percent of Wellsoft customers said that they did not see their best-of-breed solution as part of their long-term IT infrastructure strategy because of the integration offered by enterprise solutions. Fifty-two percent of T-Systems customers felt the same, in addition to 53 percent of Picis customers and 51 percent of MEDHOST customers.
Cerner was isolated in the report as the vendor that has done the least to improve usability. Users stated that they feel “hampered by inconsistent training, reactive support, and a lack of the kinds of innovation that could improve physician satisfaction.”
Clinicians felt that Cerner’s inclusion of Dynamic Documentation and PowerNote had the right idea, but in practice did little to reduce the documentation burden many clinicians struggle with in their workflow.
Epic stood out to users as the vendor that improved the most over the past year, despite still coming in under the best-of-breed solutions for usability and workflow.
“Several Epic customers report excessive and repetitive clicking, back-and-forth navigation, and upgrades that create additional clicks; at the same time, users admit that these steps/clicks have helped improve patient safety, and respondents report that the vendor delivers more information at-a-glance,” said the report.
One of the biggest workflow improvement features covered in the report was eliminating the number of steps or clicks needed to complete tasks. Clinicians using best-of-breed and enterprise solutions wished for less clicks, and some admitted that their organization’s internal decisions resulted in more clicks on their EDIS.
Healthcare organizations choosing big name enterprise solutions over smaller and better reviewed vendors is not uncommon.
A previous KLAS report on picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) came to a similar conclusion. Organizations were choosing the big-name vendors, such as GE Healthcare, despite other smaller vendors providing the improvements and support they desired.
Healthcare organizations are faced with choosing an EDIS that accommodates may aspects of health IT infrastructure. While usability is a serious challenge, making sure that the systems is interoperable with the rest of the IT environment sometimes takes precedent over what users want out of their digital tools.
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