Health Insights & Outlooks

May 19, 2006
eClinicalWorks Gets Big by Focusing on Small Practices

By Marc Holland

TEPR '06 is next week in Baltimore. Conference organizers anticipate several thousand attendees and, in hot pursuit, close to 200 vendors. There will be big ones, small ones and in-between ones; established companies and the ever-present startups; each of them pushing their EMR, EHR, PHR and oth-”eR” products. Several lucky vendors there to strut their stuff will walk away with a coveted, “Best in Show”, TEPR Award. What can this do for the award recipient? On this eve of TEPR '06, it's worth a look back to see what this past year has meant for one of the TEPR '05 awardees.

At TEPR '03, a relatively new, small and unheralded vendor of EMR and physician practice management software nearly stole the show: eClinicalWorks, of Westborough, MA. They took top honors in the small practice EMR category. Then, at TEPR '05, they again took top honors in the small practice category, as well as runner-up honors in the medium to large practice category. The result: this past year has been very good to eClinicalWorks, indeed.

In 2005, the eHealth Collaborative, as part of a $50 million demonstration project sponsored by the BCBS of MA Foundation to encourage EMR adoption in the metropolitan Boston region, organized a “bake-off” amongst EMR vendors for physician practices in three pilot communities: Newburyport, Brockton and North Adams. Selection criteria included the usual functionality, ease of installation and use, etc., but not price – since the systems selected by the physicians were to be paid for by the Foundation. On April 17, 2006, eClinicalWorks was announced as the vendor of choice by 170 out of the 180 physician practices participating, beating out, amongst others, Allscripts, NextGen and GE. This news came less than two months after eClinicalWorks was selected to be the system of choice by the Electronic Health Records of Rhode Island (EHRRI), a Providence-based consortium of hospitals and physician groups representing over 1300
physicians.

Statistics show that 60% of all medical encounters in the US annually occur in office practices of 1-3 physicians. Yet these solo and small practices have the lowest level of IT penetration, are the most price-sensitive and technology-averse. If the Federal goal of a National Health Information Network is to be realized by 2014, or ever, the crucial battle will be fought on this front. Vendors like eClinicalWorks may just turn out to be the secret weapon, and one that we will be profiling in our upcoming research.