Top Primary Care Electronic Health Records Honors Announced by 2014 Black Book Satisfaction Survey, EHR Vendor Loyalty Makes Distinct Surge Upward

New York, NY , April 6, 2014 (Newswire.com) - Black Book™ identified a steep, current shift upward in customer experience across the primary care physician sector since first measuring EHR satisfaction six years ago. In Q1 2014, only 8% of primary care doctors using electronic records were still “very dissatisfied” with the ability of their systems to decrease workload as compared to 31% of all medical and surgical specialtists this year, and 48% of primary care physicians in 2009.

Primary care user satisfaction has increased prominently in the last six months according to client responses of all practices implementing an EHR longer than two years ago. Users credit some of the recent satisfaction gains to the efforts of vendors to improve workflow issues, delivering on promises, meaningful use achievements and fortified client support.

Black Book audited 2014 user survey results indicate a significant surge in vendor loyalty as the EHR replacement market frenzy is settling down.

Additionally, 39% of family practice, general practice, pediatricians and geriatric specialists report a return to normal levels of productivity after rolling out their EHR systems. As recent as last year, only 10% of frustrated physician practices reported productivity returns after two years. Since Black Book™ announced the “Year of the Great EHR Switch” in early 2013, the share of primary care doctors who said they would recommend their electronic records vendor to a colleague increased from 13% to 52% over the past six months.

Based on the aggregate client experience and customer satisfaction scores on eighteen key performance indicators, San Francisco-based Practice Fusion ranked first across all surveyed electronic health records systems. Other top scoring primary care centric vendors include: Greenway Medical, Care360 Quest, Kareo, Praxis, AmazingCharts, CareCloud, CureMD, Allscripts, athenahealth, and eClinicalWorks.

Practice Fusion, also achieved the highest customer satisfaction scores in the primary care specialties of General Practice, Family Practice and Pediatrics.

AmazingCharts ranked first in the primary care area of Geriatrics.

Practice Fusion also scored best among all primary care physicians for system patient health data management and administrative processing, order entry and management, and results review and decision support. Clients praised Greenway Medical's EHR communications and interoperability capabilities highest in primary care.

"This first group of Black Book audited 2014 user survey results indicated a significant surge in vendor loyalty as the replacement market frenzy is settling down," said Douglas Brown, Managing Partner of Black Book Rankings. "Continually high performing vendors with loyal customer bases have emerged from the pack as practice implementations succeed and physicians find the systems that truly meet their practice needs."

Full results can be found on http://www.blackbookrankings.com, for the results of 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014 user surveys.

Since 2000, Black Book™ has polled the vendor satisfaction across over thirty industries in the software and services sectors around the globe. In 2009, Black Book began polling the client experience, of over 300,000 current healthcare software and managed services users. Black Book expanded its survey prowess and reputation of independent, unbiased crowdsourced surveying to electronic healthcare records professionals, physician practice administrators, and hospital information technology managers. Over 22,000 participated in the 2014 polls of EHR client experience in a sweeping five month study. Additionally, 6,000 study participants that have not yet fully implemented or using enterprise electronic health records provided insight on budgeting, adoption plans, factors driving EHR decisions and vendor awareness.

Black Book provides EHR/EMR users, media, investors, analysts, quality minded vendors, and prospective software system buyers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and other interested sectors of the clinical technology industry with comprehensive comparison data of the industry's top respected and competitively performing technology vendors. Black Book employs in depth key performance indicators targeted at ensuring high product and service performance through comparing vendors from the customer experience.

For methodology, auditing, resources, comprehensive research and ranking data: http://www.blackbookrankings.com.