Having already experienced significant expansion over the past five years, the U.S. market for ambulatory electronic health record (EHR) software will increase 30% by 2020, according to a new report from market research firm Frost & Sullivan.
In contrast to the mature hospital EHR market, the ambulatory EHR sector still offers potential; some ambulatory EHR software currently struggles to function seamlessly across the continuum of care and fails to demonstrate improvements in care outcomes, Frost & Sullivan said.
Healthcare providers today face challenges related to a lack of readiness for the ICD-10 coding system, poor interoperability standards, frequent EHR audits, low productivity, and high implementation costs. This may lead to new EHR functionalities such as automated data entry, risk stratification, care coordination, patient engagement, and benchmarking of clinical care performance across the healthcare ecosystem, according to the company.
The ambulatory EHR sector will grow at a 5.3% compound annual growth rate over the next five years, with growth peaking from 2019 to 2020 as more ambulatory practices are expected to embrace costlier, integrated EHRs, analyst Koustav Chatterjee said in a statement. The need for integrated EHRs will increase along with the desire of healthcare providers to benchmark outcomes at a network, practice, and patient level, Chatterjee said.
On the downside, the market is currently challenged by the high degree of fragmentation among customers and ambulatory EHR vendors. Payor consolidation will go a long way toward mitigating this issue, however, Frost & Sullivan said.
The company noted that large ambulatory practices will continue to acquire smaller practices or collaborate with accountable care organizations to maintain operating margins and enhance market share. That also increases their ability to invest in EHR software, according to the firm.
Other current market challenges include frequent EHR audits, inadequate funding and infrastructure, and the presence of unqualified incumbents. In addition, EHR data interoperability will be a difficult milestone to achieve, as the existing IT infrastructure will be hard-pressed to comply with the evolving regulations that impose futuristic technical guidelines, the company said.
