I’m really interested in trying to differentiate between the 300+ EMR vendors lately. Not to mention understanding what innovations will shape the EMR markets going forward. More on the second subject later. The first one has become even more important to me since tomorrow I plan on launching an e-book on EMR selection. Thus, I was really intrigued by a blog post by Didier Thizy from macadamian entitled, “Electronic Medical Records – 3 Key Differentiators”

In the post, he says that he’d stump EMR vendors at HIMSS 10 the following questions:
“With so many major EMR competitors out there, what is your product’s differentiator?” “What makes you stand out from the crowd?”

It’s interesting, because I asked a number of EMR vendors similar questions. Didier offers the following three answers which are NOT EMR differentiators:

• “Our EMR has been an industry standard for 20 years”
• “Our EMR is SaaS-based”
• “Our EMR is CCHIT certified”

He then offers 3 “Real” EMR differentiators:

• “Our EMR has excellent UI and usability”
• “Our EMR is designed for a particular specialty”
• “Our EMR’s technology makes the user’s life easier”

I like his 3 differentiators. I’m going to think about this and allow people to comment and then add some differentiators of my own. However, I think one problem with this list is that you need to also provide a method for measuring these differentiators. It’s easy for every EMR vendor to say that they have great usability. It’s a much harder thing to really make it usable.