“Cerner Controls a Quarter of Electronic Medical Records Market”

From the Kansas City Business Journal:

Cerner Corp., along with its competitor Epic Systems Corp., ruled the electronic health record (EHR) market in 2018, with a combined 85 percent market share in the large, 500-plus-bed hospital space, according to KLAS Research reports cited in Healthcare Dive. Epic holds a 58 percent share, while Cerner holds 27 percent.

The split is closer when it comes to all acute care hospitals in the U.S. In this larger market, Epic has a 28 percent market share and North Kansas City-based Cerner (Nasdaq: CERN) claims 26 percent of the market.

Although fewer large hospitals and health systems are buying EHRs — 80 percent of all doctors will be working at a facility that uses an EHR system by the end of this year according to Business Insider — Cerner signed the most new hospitals last year. This is due, in part, to a 10-year, $10 billion contract with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The contract, won in May 2018, includes 147 acute care and 20 specialty contracts.

In February, the VA terminated a $624 million 2015 contract with Epic and Leidos Holdings Inc. (NYSE: LDOS) so that it could adopt Cerner’s patient scheduling system, Millennium. It’s unclear how much Cerner’s new contract is worth.

In contrast, Cerner lost 65 Millennium EHR customers in the private hospital sector, including 52 from a single health system.

EHR purchases in 2018 were higher than previous years, with the continued consolidation of the health care market helping to drive those 445 deals. Since 2014, a fifth of all EHR switches at acute care hospitals have stemmed from mergers and acquisitions, according to KLAS.

Posted by on May 9th, 2019 at 5:53 am


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