U.S. Electronic Health Records Industry To Continue Growing To End Of The Decade And Beyond
Kolomara Information, a leading publisher of market research in medical markets, recently published a report entitled EMR 2015: The Market for Electronic Medical Records . In the public information released, the researchers expect that the Electronic Health Record (EHR) market will continue to grow past Meaningful Use (MU) with the incentive funding running out over the next few years.
The report projects annual market growth of seven to eight percent during the next five years, with good competition and stable growth despite the absence of incentives boosting the market. From our perspective, we see that U.S. Government penalties will assure that compliance with MU-1, MU-2 and possibly MU-3, or providers will face cuts of up to 5% of revenues; in return, this creates a continuing demand point for EHR’s.
In the U.S., the EHR market is valued at approximately $25 billion (USD) and with the above projections it could grow to well over $35 billion (USD) by the end of the decade.
As we have noted before, there are multiple hits to physician reimbursement. This includes cuts due to Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) as well as, the nearly 300,000 providers that did not meet MU-1 certification for 2015. We expect in the near future that EHR’s will be seen as an efficiency tool as well as, a requirement by patients to access their medical information via a patient portal. Once used as designed, the patients will be able to interact more effectively at lower cost with their medical provider. This will require a more material change in how medical practices use technology and interact with patients. We as an industry need to move beyond, paper, phone and fax… yes, fax machines will go the way of the pager. The reports continues with more relevant information and notes the following regarding the market leaders:
“Cerner is the vendor leader in market share with 14 percent, followed by McKesson at 13 percent and Epic at 7 percent. Other major vendors, with less market share, include Allscripts, Siemens and GE Healthcare all at 5 percent, Athenahealth (3 percent), Meditech and NextGen (2 percent), and eClinicalWorks (1 percent). All others make up the remaining 43 percent of market share.”
It is evident, based on this information, there is still a great opportunity for new entrants. We believe those entrants need to focus on bringing move value-added to the market for both providers and patients, maybe not more functionality but more easily operated with more combined services beyond even practice management. We believe that to achieve full market penetration, an emerging EHR must include voice recognition, integrated telemedicine, data analytics, decision support and medical risk management for more outcomes based and accountable care environments.
– Noel J. Guillama, President
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