Post-Acute Care Orgs Face EHR Interoperability Challenges

Post-acute care providers want EHR platforms tailored for their specific area but continue to face interoperability and care coordination challenges, according to a KLAS report.

No EHR vendor has delivered solutions across the entire breadth of post-acute care settings. Typically, organizations offer home- or facility-based care, so purchase decisions are usually driven by one type of care.

MatrixCare has achieved solid adoption across several post-acute care settings and performs consistently well in home health, hospice, and LTC/SNF.

WellSky offers tools for all measured care settings. However, adoption remains very low in some environments, like LTC/ SNF.

Customers using Epic’s post-acute care technology are satisfied, despite gaps in critical areas, such as tablet-based documentation for home health. Users also note that workflows continue to be geared more toward inpatient settings. However, customers say they are confident in the EHR vendor’s ability to keep up with regulatory requirements and continued development.

MEDITECH has seen less adoption of its post-acute care health IT. Those who use MEDITECH’s post-acute care solutions for home health and hospice, which are separate from the Expanse platform, are moderately satisfied. Users report wanting quicker development and improved EHR usability.

Cerner offers platforms for facility-based care and behavioral health. For home-based settings, the vendor depends on its partnership with MatrixCare. Cerner customers say that the vendor is focused on other challenges besides building an enterprise strategy for post-acute care.

Organizations using Cerner’s solutions for LTC/SNF and behavioral health are satisfied with the product quality. Clients noted that more ongoing training would help ensure they can maximize all capabilities.

Customers of all post-acute care vendors share concerns with their products lacking needed functionality. Reporting is one of the most common functionality requests.

Overall, clients want to be able to aggregate data from third-party technologies and get better financial and clinical insights at the organizational level.

While PointClickCare customers feel the company has done well at building out needed reporting functionality for LTC/SNF, they are looking for more flexibility to analyze data from PDF reports. MatrixCare customers also report success with many aspects of the vendor’s reporting. However, some organizations said they had been held back by insufficient financial claims reporting.

WellSky customers experience glitches that stop them from accessing reports or drilling down for more information.

Netsmart customers have a variety of functionality requests; many want additional, customizable reporting. Others cite the need for better integration of data from HIEs.