Munising Memorial Hospital, an 11-bed, critical access hospital in Munising, Michigan, announced Monday that it plans to implement Cerner EHR and related cloud services. 

MMH joins the increasing number of smaller hospitals turning to cloud subscriptions from Allscripts, Cerner, athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, Epic, Meditech and others instead of running and maintaining the software on-premises themselves. 

[Also: New EHR go-lives, RFIs and other interesting moves so far in April]

Black Book Research, in fact, published a report on Monday that found nearly one-third of the 19,000 polled physician practices intend to switch vendors in the next three years and the majority of those are considering cloud services from electronic health record to practice management and revenue cycle capabilities, as well as telehealth, virtual care services and even speech recognition. 

Along with the EHR, Munising Memorial also signed up for Cerner’s new online patient portal, which gives patients the ability to securely message their doctors, schedule appointments, view and settle balances and access their health history.

[Also: EHRs in the cloud: Why smaller healthcare providers are making the leap]

MMH also will employ Cerner’s revenue cycle management technology for billing and tracking financial data. Specifically, MMH will be able to integrate financial data with clinical data from the Cerner Millennium EHR into one patient record to enable staffers to update billing throughout a patient’s visit with the goal of enhancing documentation to both improve reimbursement and reduce errors, the hospital said. 

Munising Memorial CEO Melissa Hall said in a statement that the provider will transition to Cerner’s Millennium EHR in the hospital, doctor’s office and outpatient clinics.

Twitter: @Bernie_HITN
Email the writer: bernie.monegain@himssmedia.com