CPSI, Cerner, GE Healthcare and Picis emerged as the vendors whose inpatient EHRs are most favored by customers in a four-month user poll conducted by Black Book Rankings.

EHRs ranked at the top for customer experience in the 2012 Black Book Rankings user survey are:

• CPSI for hospitals with fewer than 100 beds,
• Cerner for community hospitals with 101-249 beds,
• GE Healthcare for academic teaching hospitals and major medical centers of 250 beds or more,
• Cerner for healthcare systems, hospital chains and integrated delivery networks,
• Picis for emergency department EHR.

Vendors also receiving top scores in multiple key performance areas of inpatient EHR included Allscripts/Eclipsys, Epic Systems, Healthcare Management Systems, Healthland, McKesson, Meditech, NextGen, Quadramed and Siemens Medical across all survey hospital subgroups.

Black Book took into account the areas of:

• Certification-required EHR functionalities,
• Administrative functionalities,
• Clinical workflow functionalities and documentation functionalities,
• e-Prescribing modules,
• Accountable care organization data needs, and
• Health Information Exchange.

“Hospital leaders are seeking empirical data from EHR users to make informed vendor choices,” said Scott Wilson, co-founder of Black Book Rankings. “EHR vendors that actively support their clients past implementation, demonstrate best-of-breed technology and provide innovative solutions with highly responsive staff lead the 2012 inpatient customer satisfaction polling,”

"Almost 80percent of the nation's hospitals and half of office-based physicians plan to grab over $27 billion in federal incentives for adoption and meaningful use of EHR technology, so the past buyer experience is driving current buyer decisions more than ever,” Wilson added.

Black Book Rankings polled more 12,000 current EHR users, healthcare records professionals, physician practice administrators and hospital information technology managers regarding their satisfaction with their vendors. Additionally, 68,000 study participants that have not yet fully implemented or use electronic health records provided insight on budgeting, adoption plans, factors driving EHR decisions and vendor awareness. For the vendor ranking portion from July to October, 3,342 qualified inpatient EHR system users were validated.