Top EHR makers are leaving the rest in their dust, IDC says
IDC predicted significant merger and acquisition activity on the electronic health record and revenue cycle management horizons, and soon.
“Consolidation of the EHR market continued to dramatically separate the top 2-3 EHR firms from the rest of the EHR software firms,” Sven Lohse, research manager for Healthcare IT Services Strategies at IDC’s Health Insights unit, wrote in an email. “Epic, Cerner, eClinicalWorks, and athenahealth grew strongly, while competitors languished or shrank.”
Epic, in fact, took the fifth slot on IDC’s HealthTech Rankings 2017 that the firm revealed on Monday.
Epic is part of IDC’s Top 50, which encompasses companies that generate more than 33 percent of overall revenue from healthcare providers or payers. The others are Optum, Cerner, GE Healthcare and McKesson Technology Solutions, respectively. Allscripts crossed the finish line in sixth place, with athenahealth sliding into the seventh spot.
[Also: Is a takeover of athenahealth inevitable?]
While producing the rankings, IDC also compiled what Lohse called second order insights, notably that hospitals should act now to prepare for vendor consolidation among revenue cycle management vendors, top companies such as Optum, Cerner and Epic will expand clinically-oriented offerings with analytics for value-based care, and the EHR market maturation so many people in the industry are expecting is quickly approaching.
“EHR market share is concentrating with vendors that have the scale and accelerating the rate at which we can expect smaller firms to be acquired or shrink,” Lohse wrote. “Rapid consolidation by M&A in this marketplace is imminent.”
IDC also ranked the Enterprise Top 25 vendors, meaning they have a healthcare presence but collect less than 33 percent of revenue from providers and payers. The top five within IDC’s Enterprise 25 are IBM, Royal Philips, Siemens, Intel and Microsoft.
The consultancy bases its HealthTech Rankings on total revenue for both calendar and fiscal years 2015 and 2016.
Twitter: SullyHIT
Email the writer: tom.sullivan@himssmedia.com
