EHR vendors have expanded their patient-record sharing capabilities in recent years, but clinicians still report little improvement in how usable that data is, a Dec. 1 report from KLAS Research found.
The report examines provider-to-provider record exchange, third-party application integration and payer-provider data sharing.
Here are five key findings from the report:
- Clinician agreement that their EHR “provides expected integration with outside organizations” has remained between 39% and 49% from 2018 to 2024, according to KLAS Arch Collaborative data.
- Participation in networks such as CommonWell, Carequality and qualified health information networks has increased among major vendors since 2018 — including Epic, Oracle Health, Meditech, Athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, NextGen Healthcare, Greenway Health and Altera Digital Health — improving data availability but not necessarily usability.
- KLAS found no correlation between the number of proprietary application programming interfaces an EHR vendor provides and customer satisfaction with third-party app integration. API volume varies widely across vendors, but outcomes do not.
- Clinicians continue to face duplicative records, inconsistent formats and poor data mapping — all of which limit the clinical value of shared data despite broader availability.
- Payer-provider interoperability struggles are tied more to trust gaps than technology, KLAS found, with organizations citing concerns about data sharing and fraud risk.
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