Electronic Health Reporter

EHR review sites seem to have taken hold. Press releases and announcements galore, they proliferate the web like nearly other consumer review-based site. In the latest round, one of the newest sites, EMR-Matrix, essentially announced its existence and that its staff and leadership would be present at one of healthcare’s largest tradeshows – HIMSS.

What better a place to try to sell its product where the very companies that it will likely hold hostage through its so-called independent review will be present.

According to the company’s release, “The new website offers a way for doctors and health systems to evaluate, test and read reviews of electronic medical record software systems, as well as provide feedback on their own experiences with their existing EMR and practice management systems. Unlike other sites, EMR-Matrix is user content driven and strives to provide the most candid feedback possible about each EMR system.”

I absolutely believe that the (free) market needs dedicated resources that help consumers find the best products at the best prices while exposing a company’s weaknesses and touting its greatest successes, but I’m not in favor of sites bent on trying to manipulate the system.

I may be in the minority, but I don’t believe in review sites, and I don’t use them. Too often, the reviews are skewed toward the negative, the sounds of the blathering loudmouth without a better venue to employ turns to the web and spouts off. They do almost nothing to keep me from experiencing something I want to experience. Certainly, I don’t believe an un-vetted review site about electronic health records is going to do much to sway my opinion one way or another about the quality of a product being professionally produced by a software vendor, but it may sway the opinions of others.

Essentially, the site is taking the business model that Software Advice utilizes and is trying to position itself as another unbiased source of information that also uses aggregated customer reviews to provide the “true” sentiment of a system and its capabilities.

If nothing else, this is just another form of KLAS, which I’ve always been suspect of. Based on my experiences in house at an EHR vendor, I’ve seen the data used to compile the reports and with the conclusions these types of reports drawn, there is a great deal left to the imagination. Companies – Allscripts is an example – that choose not to subscribe to the KLAS and, therefore, forgo receiving the KLAS reports should earn everyone’s respect. They don’t bow to the peer pressure of inclusion and they understand that for the most part, the reports or worth far less than the paper they’re printed on (even though vendors pay upwards of $60,000 to see them). Nevertheless, the data in the reports are suspect and thin, and given the strangle hold KLAS has on vendors, to not subscribe is virtual suicide for the vendor (Allscripts is big enough not to have been too deeply affected, though its products are never anywhere near the top of the rankings in the KLAS reports).

That said, EMR-Matrix and others that come along might do more damage than good. If nothing else, in my opinion, at face value, they seem to be out to capitalize on the market. Let’s hope the consumers of health IT and EHRs see through this thinly veiled attempt, but there’s still some skepticism on my part that this will be the case. My blogger colleagues have agreed with me so I hope those in the market for a new EHR will actually do a little shopping around and testing rather than simply relying on a site such as this.

Unfortunately, some of the collateral damage of a site like this is like that of a “bad” restaurant — once the review hits the web, it pretty much lives there forever. For people like me in PR, and those around me who are actually dedicating their lives to developing what we believe are good, solid, high-quality products to better healthcare, physician’s practices and patients’ lives, we lose because of sites like this. We’re the ones who lose sleep. We’re the ones that lose our jobs. We’re the ones who lose – because of a site that’s pairing the information provided with those seeking it, as relevant.