Moving Your Small Practice Health IT Clients To Cloud EHR Solutions

By Megan Williams, contributing writer

While much of the industry is moving on toward advanced EHR (electronic health record) use and data analytics, smaller players in healthcare are still playing catch up — a fact that can be quite useful to solutions providers looking to tackle this corner of the market. A new Black Book survey on cloud-based EHR products sheds light on some of the deeper details of the market.

The Survey

Black Book surveyed 5,700 small and solo medical practices in 2015 and found that, according to 83 percent of the respondents, cloud-based EHRs were the biggest trend of the last few years. They cited benefits in areas including:

• implementations
• usability
• updates
• customization

An improvement in all of these factors has led to an overall increase in EHR satisfaction of just under 13 percent in 2012 to 81 percent. According to managing Partner of Black Book, Doug Brown, “The focus of healthcare technology vendors needs to be on mobile, cloud, and data integration to successfully meet the future demands of the changing healthcare landscape. The bigger issues of interoperability and population health outcomes, quality of care reporting, and ICD-10 have framed the third-generation EHR vendor, and the majority (69 percent) of small practices plan to increase their investment in the advancements made by their current cloud-based vendor.”

The Big Barriers

The survey also found that this group of EHR users has grown from an adoption rate of 60 percent in 2013 to 82 percent this year in urban settings. In rural settings, the adoption rate has generally remained unchanged at around 20 percent, largely due to a fear of Internet outages cited by 91 percent of non-urban physician respondents.

Overall though, pricing is what’s keeping most small medical practices from pulling the trigger on a cloud EHR solution — 79 percent of respondents indicated so.

Beyond that, 38 percent indicated moderate to serious concerns around privacy and security of health records even while the vast majority (90 percent) understand that cloud EHR platform models are one of the best ways to protect PHI (protected health information).

Getting Your Clients Over The Hump

While many of your clients might initially be reluctant, you may be able to connect with them by honing in on their current frustrations and fears, and selling them on solutions that address those issues in specific ways.

When selling EHR solutions, focus on security benefits and add-ons, making sure they are communicated in clear ways and are aligned with current threats to their patients’ information. It will also likely be a benefit to stress backup options, as some smaller healthcare providers may still be skeptical of the stability of the cloud environment.

Solutions providers will be prudent to do some damage control around the perception of cost — 48 percent of small practice survey respondents that had switched solutions between June 2014 and May 2015 reported that the financial burden of changing systems had left their practices in an unstable financial position.

Additionally, almost 70 percent of respondents agreed that their first-gen solutions were not living up to their expectations and that they were particularly dissatisfied with affected workflows, cost add-ons, and patient care time that had been lost. Emphasizing the ways in which cloud EHR solutions can address these issues will be crucial in winning over smaller, more change-averse decision-makers.

Going Deeper

To read about the plug-and-play future of EHR, read this article on the use of FHIR standards in the EHR space.