Electronic health records (EHRs) are ubiquitous in U.S. hospitals, and many EHR systems now offer analytics on top of the health records.
- But is this technology sufficient for the analytics that healthcare organizations need to gain meaningful insights, thereby improving outcomes?
- And how does EHR analytics compare to the analytics provided by third-party solutions?
Those are the questions that this survey by Definitive Healthcare set out to answer.
The survey discovered that EHR analytics (i.e. analytics provided with the EHR system) yields lower user satisfaction than both an analytics-specific platform from 3rd party suppliers or in-house developed solutions.
It found that users were mostly frustrated with the EHR analytics solutions speed, the lack of robustness, and the lack of interoperability.
108 healthcare leaders were surveyed about their use of analytics solutions, which revealed:
- 90% of healthcare organisations use analytics with their EHR systems.
- Nearly 50% of organisations use EHR analytics exclusively or as their primary analytics tool.
Although there is widespread use, there is lower satisfaction with the EHR analytics:
- Users of EHR analytics reported an average satisfaction rating of 5.58 on a scale 0-10 (0-extremely dissatisfied, 10=extremely satisfied).
- In-house analytics users reported an average satisfaction rating of 6.51.
- The analytic-specific platforms users recorded 6.69 rating.
EHR analytics users find technological challenges with their solutions:
- 43.4% felt reporting and querying of EHR analytics is slow.
- 35.8% said the component is not robust or advanced enough.
- 30.2% said they had challenged interoperability with other systems.
- 28.3% felt EHR analytics lacks the visualization they need.
- 26.4% said the user interface is difficult to understand or use.
However, top challenges with analytics-specific platforms were interoperability with other systems (59.4%) and cost (40.6%). Both current users (6.85 on 0-10 scale) and non-users (7.40) of these platforms felt the solution could add value to their ability to perform analytics.
“This survey demonstrates that while EHR companies claim to provide comprehensive analytics to their customers, hospitals and health systems feel these tools are lacking in functionality,” says George Dealy, vice president of healthcare solutions at Dimensional Insight. “Analytics users find these tools slow, unadvanced, and not catered to their needs, while finding much greater satisfaction with analytics-specific platforms.”
Dimensional Insight (author of the Diver Platform, the 2020 Best in KLAS healthcare business intelligence and analytics solution) sponsored this Definitive Healthcare survey on EHR analytics. For more information and to download the full survey see https://www.dimins.com/blog/2020/05/04/ehr-analytics-survey/
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