I’ve had this post in the hopper since HIMSS back in early March. Unfortunately, it got lost in my other 200 or so draft posts that I work from for future posts. We’ll see if people think I should have left the idea in my drafts or not.
During one my meetings with EMR vendors I discussed the value of KLAS and why this EMR vendor was so HIGH on CCHIT (they’re booth had it plastered all over) and why they chose not to have KLAS ratings plastered beside their CCHIT marketing plan. This really smart EMR vendor marketing manager had previously described the marketing value (note that I didn’t say technical or clinical value) of having the CCHIT certification. So, why not KLAS?
This EMR vendor had obviously done their homework and had considered getting the KLAS rating. The reason they didn’t go that direction was he asked an interesting question of KLAS. He wanted to know how many people actually went to KLAS and downloaded the ratings from their website. Obviously, if they had hundreds of thousands of doctors downloading the ratings from their website, then it could be a great marketing tool for the EMR vendor to sell more product.
Turns out only 5000 people actually downloaded the KLAS ratings. When you add in the EMR vendors and other people who don’t purchase an EMR, that’s such a small footprint. I’ll admit that I’ve seen the KLAS name around a lot of places, but I’ve seen it less and less lately. Does anyone care about KLAS anymore? I’m going to Utah later this month. Maybe I should stop in and say Hi. Seems like there’s such an opportunity in the EMR space right now and they might be missing out.
Seems like the folks over at healthsystemcio.com still do.
5,000 seems like a lot of people to me
wmc,
I guess it’s all about perspective. I do about 5000+ pageviews a day on this site. So, when you compare say the value of an ad on this site with KLAS, it pales in comparison. Plus, when you think about how many of those 5000 downloads are actual doctors and not just industry analysts or other EMR vendors, then it’s even less significant.
As clinical informatics analyst, I have used KLAS off and on for years. It gives some basic comparison facts that are useful in preparring vendor selection material.
“This EMR vendor had obviously done their homework and had considered getting the KLAS rating.”
KLAS is completely independent and user-reviewed. You can’t “get” a KLAS rating, it is given by your users. If there is no KLAS review on that vendor they there may not be enough users either that use it or to review it. KLAS does not report all reviews if the number of reviews is statistically insignficant. You also can’t get “un-rated” by KLAS either. So a good or bad rating stays. As to downloads, I think most of the downloads are vendors/industry/press. Even though you have to attest that you are employed by a healthcare organization when you register, I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen KLAS ratings cited by non-clinicians.
Depends on how you define get. They definitely want EMR vendors to pay them big money. Plus, there are so many ways for an EMR vendor to bias the results of the KLAS survey. A simple email to the users of an EMR could easily bias it.
The latest report I saw by specialty had a lot of EMR vendors listed and then had the * that said they didn’t have enough data to qualify the rating that was being given. That sounds like reporting data that’s not significantly significant.
As you point out, it doesn’t matter all that much since the people who most download the report are not doctors.