About 90 percent of healthcare providers that purchased electronic medical records technology are off track to meet their meaningful use implementation goals, according to the 2011 Black Book Ranking's user survey.

Black Book Rankings is a division of the market research firm Brown-Wilson Group. Its user survey ranks the top EMR vendors for 2011 based on key performance indicators including meaningful use.

As a subset of the 2011 Black Book Ranking's Electronic Health Record (EMR) User Survey, nearly 4000 healthcare leaders responded on several commonly discussed EMR issues. Despite the technology's escalating adoption rate, the survey found that only one in 10 users foresees achieving the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 requirements for stimulus funding by this spring.

"Over four hundred Electronic Health Records (EHR) system developers have emerged in the market over the past year and, as in most fast adoption environments, not all vendors equally service and support their new clients," said Kevin Parker, lead EHR researcher for Black Book Rankings.

"The customers of only a handful of high performance EHR vendors expressed high confidence in meeting the demonstration of meaningful use deadlines," adds Parker. "The perception of an effective technology partner is highly dependent on the quality of EHR vendor support through a several month implementation."

 EHR users surveyed indicated the following as the top five reasons they are losing implementation traction:

1. A lack of substantive support from their EHR vendor (93 percent);
2. Delayed implementation due to the cost of additional support from EHR vendor/consultants (89 percent);
3. A hurried selection of an EHR vendor has resulted in negative consequences (82 percent);
4. Lack available and/or trained staff to properly implement an EHR (77 percent); and
5. They are unprepared and underfunded to rectify difficult system interfaces (69 percent).

"User experience is the only accurate way to assess future performance for prospective EHR buyers," said Parker. "The top performing vendors have demonstrated, as a qualified group, their ability to satisfy client expectations higher than the entire field of competing EHR vendors. This will be evidenced in the meaningful use success rates of 2011 by their collective clients."