By Jacqueline LaPointe

According to a new KLAS report, small hospitals are changing out their EHR and patient accounting systems more often than their larger peers. Many of these small hospitals are considering top EHR vendors, including Oracle Health, MEDITECH, and Epic.

MEDITECH leads the vendors in terms of value, the report shows. Small hospitals — those with 250 beds or less — using MEDITECH’s Expanse Patient Accounting gave the system 88.5 out of 100 points for value. Customers felt the vendor drives tangible outcomes by delivering “a very affordable and stable solution, keeping up with regulatory items, and consistently developing new functionality.”

KLAS’ report also put MEDITECH at the top of user charts for client relationship (88.0 points), company culture (88.4 points), and operations (81.7 points).

Epic did beat out MEDITECH for product, with Epic Community Connect Resolute users giving it 86.6 points. MEDITECH’s Expanse Patient Accounting earned 84.6 points. Users told KLAS that Epic’s solution is highly functional for small hospitals, providing much-needed tools and delivering new technology in response to changing reimbursement rules.

Epic users also commented on the vendor’s deep integration, which was a part of their decision to move to Epic.

While MEDITECH leads most categories, Epic is not far behind, earning 81.1 points for relationship, 84.1 points for culture, 78.5 points for operations, and 70.4 points for value. Epic also saw significant performance improvement from 2020 to 2022, with its overall performance score rising from below 80.0 points.

KLAS also included in the report responses from CPSI Evident Thrive Patient Management users and Oracle Health CommunityWorks users. Oracle Health is the new name for EHR heavy-hitter Cerner.

Users gave CPSI 58.8 points for value, while Oracle Health users settled on 49.0 points. The report also shows that CPSI and Oracle Health “fail to deliver expectations,” with users complaining about gaps in patient accounting functionalities and lackluster support for solution issues.

Notably, all patient accounting vendors in the report struggle to provide training that meets the needs of small hospitals. KLAS found that no single vendor excelled in the operations category. Even users of MEDITECH, which ranked the highest among all vendors in the category, said the training materials do not provide enough detail and vendor resources cover topics too quickly. Epic users detailed a similar experience.

On the other hand, Oracle Health provides a lot of information for training. However, users had to search for needed information and wanted more proactive guidance from the vendor, KLAS reported.

Other vendors considered in the report but for which KLAS had limited data included MEDHOST and athenahealth.

The report gives the highest overall performance score to MEDITECH. Although CPSI’s Evident Thrive Patient Management solution earned top marks with 69.4 points in the 2023 Best in KLAS report for patient accounting and patient management among hospitals with 150 beds or fewer. Oracle Health was the only other vendor to have its solution compared in the category. MEDITECH was not ranked as part of the category because of limited data, the Best in KLAS report showed. The vendor received 85.7 points.*

“Patient accounting has been a strength of MEDITECH for as long as we have measured,”  co-founder and CEO of KLAS, Adam Gale said in a statement. “Our data, collected from hundreds of healthcare providers, shows that MEDITECH is a leading option for those healthcare organizations in need of a high-quality solution at a reasonable price.”

• Editor’s Note: CORRECTION 03/09/2023: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that CPSI’s Evident Thrive Patient Management won a Best in KLAS award for patient accounting and patient management. No Best in KLAS award was given out for the category. CPSI’s solution had earned the highest overall performance score among compared solutions.