The survey indicated 93 percent of physician practices and small hospitals that acquired an EHR product from the CIO’s office of a flagship hospital “felt obligated to only select that EHR from the hospital reseller,” according to a news release. Eighty percent of physicians who replaced their EHRs for the hospital network’s EHR in 2014 said they felt pressure to select the EHR the hospital was selling for fear of being left out of community HIEs, referral networks, physician alerts and patient portals.
Additionally, Black Book conducted a survey inspection of EHR user ballots collected from Q3 2014 to Q1 2015 and found 33 hospital resellers submitted EHR satisfaction and loyalty responses for 740 physician practices, prompting the market research firm to conduct further audits, resurvey participants and ultimately resolve this “intentional bias,” according to the release.
According to the internal review, Black Book found hospital managers selling EHR products to community physicians or other inpatient facilities rated that EHR up to 49 percent higher in satisfaction scores and 73 percent higher in vendor loyalty than the physicians and staff who actually use the product, the release indicates.
“It’s not Black Book’s issue that community physicians were pressured into implementing a particular EHR from their hospital leader,” said Doug Brown, partner of Black Book. “Black Book’s issue is that the hospital IT managers responsible for [re]selling and overseeing system implementations for particular EHR suites were also grading the product satisfaction and service delivery perceptions on behalf of providers they actually sold to.”
Black Book conducted a post-survey sampling of 800 community physicians and inpatient facilities under 100 beds and found 48 percent of larger hospital channel partners took liberties in scoring the physician practices’ EHR satisfactions.
“That is no different than soliciting a salesman to rate his own merchandise,” Mr. Brown said in the release.
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