KLAS Asks: How Usable are EHRs?

A new report from vendor research firm KLAS Enterprises assesses user perceptions of the usability of nine major ambulatory electronic health record products.


A new report from vendor research firm KLAS Enterprises assesses user perceptions of the usability of nine major ambulatory electronic health record products. They include Allscripts Enterprise, athenahealth, Cerner, eClinicalWorks, Epic, GE Healthcare CPS, Greenway, McKesson Practice Partner and NextGen.

Providers reporting achieving high usability of their EHR ranged from 55 percent of McKesson users to 85 percent of athenahealth users. Many providers, regardless of the product, put significant investment into making their system more usable.

Athenahealth and Epic received the best scores for guiding clients to increase usability of the systems. Both vendors, according to KLAS, “share a common reputation for hand-holding and prescriptive, best-practice implementations.”

Scoring poor on code quality, which affects usability according to KLAS, were Allscripts and McKesson. “Both vendors had the smallest portions of customers who felt successful and the largest portions that invested extensive effort to make their systems usable.” The report, “Ambulatory EMR Usability 2013,” is available for purchase at klasresearch.com/reports.