Meaningful Use EHR Breakout by Percentage
Written by: John Lynn
I’ve seen a bunch of different websites listing the top 10 EHR vendors based on physicians who attested to meaningful use using their EHR software. This list is certainly interesting and worthy of a discussion. However, I think it’s also important to put these numbers in some context. Remember that these numbers are just for the ambulatory EHR space. The Hospital EHR numbers are a different story which I’ll probably cover on Hospital EMR and EHR.
Here are the EHR incentive numbers by EHR vendor and also the percentage of meaningful use attestations they had (Thanks to Dr. Rowley for the numbers):
| EHR Vendor | MU Attestations | Percentage |
| Epic | 11075 | 23% |
| Allscripts | 5743 | 12% |
| eCW | 4057 | 8% |
| NextGen | 2237 | 5% |
| GE | 2002 | 4% |
| Athena | 1733 | 4% |
| Greenway | 1650 | 3% |
| Cerner | 1375 | 3% |
| MEDENT (Previously Community Computer Service) | 1264 | 3% |
| e-MDs | 1235 | 3% |
| Practice Fusion | 1156 | 2% |
| Sage | 1140 | 2% |
| Other EHRs (272) | 14358 | 29% |
As Dr. Rowley points out in his post, Epic is the largest vendor on the list, but they don’t market or sale their product to independent clinics or even independent physician groups. Epic’s ambulatory EHR is found in owned or affiliated clinics who use the ambulatory piece of the EHR an Epic hospital buys. So, the above Epic number actually provides an insight into how many ambulatory practices are associated with Epic using hospitals.
The numbers tell an interesting story if you take Epic out of the mix:
| EHR Vendor | MU Attestations | Percentage |
| Allscripts | 5743 | 15% |
| eCW | 4057 | 11% |
| NextGen | 2237 | 6% |
| GE | 2002 | 5% |
| Athena | 1733 | 5% |
| Greenway | 1650 | 4% |
| Cerner | 1375 | 4% |
| MEDENT (Previously Community Computer Service) | 1264 | 3% |
| e-MDs | 1235 | 3% |
| Practice Fusion | 1156 | 3% |
| Sage | 1140 | 3% |
| Other EHRs (272) | 14358 | 38% |
Once you take out the hospital dominance in the ambulatory market, the EHR market share for any one EHR vendor is quite small. In fact, the other EHR vendor category has 38% of the EHR market. The long tail of EHR software is definitely at play right now.
Plus, we have to be really careful using meaningful use attestation as a proxy for the EHR market. I recently saw a figure that only 20% of the ambulatory EHR market had attested to meaningful use. That’s right, the above numbers only represent 20% of the ambulatory market.
If my math is correct, that still leaves almost 200,000 providers that aren’t represented in the above analysis of 50k providers. Imagine an EHR vendor comes along that’s so great that they quickly capture only 20% of the 200,000 uncounted providers (no small feat). That would give them about 40,000 providers and using the above numbers they would have 45% of the EHR market (including Epic).
Of course, the current EHR vendors will continue to sale EHR software and many will switch EHR software vendors during that time as well. Plus, no doubt many of those who haven’t attested to meaningful use already have an EHR, but aren’t represented in the numbers above. They just either don’t care about meaningful use and EHR incentive money or they’re still working to get to the point where they can attest to meaningful use. However, I still think the above numbers illustrate that there’s plenty of opportunity available for an upstart EHR company to get plenty of EHR market share.
It’s going to be an exciting next couple years as we watch all of this shake out. We’ll take a look back at this post in a few years to see how far we’ve come.
