Every day, more health care providers’ operations rely on long-term aspects of record-keeping — from care coordination to revenue management, it is all tied to the records we keep. The world of electronic medical records (EMR) software can be daunting. You know you need one, but how do you choose the right product? One name that comes up frequently in a basic search for EMR is Epic software. We’re going to tell you about some excellent Epic competitors to help you make an informed choice in medical software.

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We’re going to tell you about some excellent Epic software competitors and alternatives to help you make an informed choice in medical software. Here’s what we’ll cover in this article:

• An Epic Comparison
• athenahealth
• Cerner Ambulatory
• DrChrono
• eClinicalWorks
• AdvancedMD
• The Final Word

An Epic Comparison

So why the focus on Epic? Well, mainly because it’s kind of hard to ignore. A recent report states that Epic maintains the largest market share for acute care hospitals as of 2020 and holds more than 250 million patient records in their system.

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And while this is mainly due to its consistent successful care delivery, the same does not in any way suggest that people are not seeking Epic alternatives. For those looking for a change, we’ve compiled a list of EMR records on Epic systems competitors for your convenience.

athenahealth

Athenahealth empowers health care organizations to coordinate and enhance patient-centric care for better treatment delivery. It offers a wide range of robust features, including documentation, scheduling, billing management, reporting and lab integration. As a cloud-based solution, it focuses on improving office productivity and efficiency by giving providers instant access to health trends, financial metrics and staff performance.

Use athenahealth’s customizable dashboards to bring together scattered health care information in one place.

Top 5 Highest-rated Modules:

• Medical Billing – 97
• Electronic Prescriptions – 97
• Mobile EHR – 93
• Clinical Workflows Management – 92
• Collaboration – 92

Benefits

• Improve Care Delivery: Automate daily time-intensive administrative and clerical tasks by providing health care professionals with swift access to patient demographics, treatment details, medication files and other vital information for accelerated care delivery process.
• Optimize Daily Workflows: Optimize your organization’s cognitive, operational and clinical efficiency by limiting day-to-day manual tasks through functionality configuration. Use electronic tools to drive front-office productivity and meet unique departmental requirements.
• Enhance Patient Engagement: Enable swift and active communication between patients and providers by providing a secure portal for instant messaging, appointment scheduling, setting reminders, requesting lab test reports and acquiring prescription refills.
• Interoperability: Enable seamless collaboration among various care settings, providers and organizations using a safe information exchange architecture. Staff members can directly connect with pharmacies and lab technicians.

Features

• Revenue Cycle Management: Streamline coding procedures using an electronic revenue cycle management module. Enable digital report generation of reimbursements, superbills and outstanding claims, thereby reducing paper waste to save time and eliminate human errors.
• Documentation: Provide dynamic patient health records to providers across the care continuum by enabling remote access to information globally. Ensure enhanced care by exchanging critical information among practices and specialists using digital records.
• Patient Portal: Facilitate online portals to give patients greater access to medical information and health reports. Enable digital appointment requests, prescription refills and instant messaging.

Limitations

• Evasive customer support system.
• A complex dashboard makes finding individual patient files challenging.
• Tedious claim clearing procedure.
• Message notifications occur without receiving new text messages.

athenahealth excels in some areas where Epic systems still lag — for instance, athenahealth is rated higher as it offers a wide range of features (16) to its users than epic (4).

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Cerner Ambulatory

Cerner Ambulatory is engineered to help organizations boost day-to-day clinical processes without hindering the work of clinicians or documenting staff. In multiple areas of practice administration, offices can utilize aspects of this cloud-based platform to make workflows flow more smoothly and free up doctors’ time to focus on quality patient care.

Edit, view and share individual patient records using Cerner Ambulatory’s interoperable structure.

Top 5 Highest-rated Modules:

• Clinical Workflows Management – 100
• Collaboration – 100
• Medical Billing – 100
• Electronic Prescriptions – 97
• Clinical Charts – 94

Benefits

• Increase Productivity: Provide practitioners, admin staff and technicians with a one-stop platform for crucial and real-time information using a customizable dashboard.
• Facilitate Interoperability: Safeguard patient data by using a secure platform for sharing information with other users. Enable providers to make informed and data-driven decisions without requiring security clearance on patient files and crucial health care information.
• Enhance Care Delivery: Centralize chart management to provide practitioners across the care continuum with each patient’s comprehensive medical history and swift access to update individual files to keep them maintained.

Features

• Documentation: Alleviate data-entry burden on your practice staff by automating documentation requirements, including notes-making, billing, e-prescribing and more. Reduce transcription costs and time spent on dictation by facilitating a digitized functionality for streamlined record-keeping, editing and updating from anywhere globally.
• Patient Portal: Provide patients with a useful means to communicate, share and exchange crucial medical information among providers, pharmacists, lab technicians and care staff. Alert patients about their upcoming appointments, test reports and messages using reminder widgets with unique color-coded labels.
• Customizable Dashboard: Enable providers and clinicians to glance at important information and high-priority patient files with customization options. Delegate staff tasks and review performance analytics regularly to keep the organizational operations running smoothly and efficiently.

Limitations

• Steep learning curve.
• Clunky system processes.
• Glitchy integrations.

Cerner is the main Epic system competitor for market share, but as the field has matured, Cerner has made strides that Epic has failed to match. For example, the health problems and diagnoses list offered by Cerner EMR is much more user-friendly and easily navigable than the dated interface offered by Epic.

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DrChrono

DrChrono is a cloud-based, integrated solution for large and small ambulatory clinics, hospitals and enterprises to digitize records, thereby improving administrational focus and staff efficiency. It provides a process and a protocol for working closely with patient health data using a wide range of features, including a patient portal, medical billing and e-prescribing.

Simplify workflows, including patient management and engagement using DrChrono’s customizable dashboard.

Top 5 Highest-rated Modules:

• Notes and Templates – 98
• Clinical Workflows Management – 97
• Medical Billing – 95
• Mobile EHR – 94
• Platform Capabilities – 94

Benefits

• Improve Operational Efficiency: Make patient records available to staff members, meaning all authorized parties can conveniently locate, peruse and utilize patient information. Streamline administrative tasks, such as filling out medical forms, requesting medication refills and booking appointments by digitizing these processes using a comprehensive set of electronic tools, including documentation, patient portal and e-prescribing.
• Enhance Information Sharing: Automate information delivery and crucial information exchange among providers, pharmacists, lab technicians and patients using a HIPAA-compliant electronic module. Avoid manual information entry into patient files by enabling staff to electronically document and store treatment progress reports, health records and care files.
• Save Time: Provide staff with easy and quick access to patient records, medical files and other important health care information to save daily time spent on locating paper-based documents.

Features

• Patient Portal: Enable patients to participate in their health care by providing them instant access to medical files, prescriptions and lab test results. Bridge the gap between providers, care team members and patients by facilitating a secure messaging platform to chat, gain insights into treatment procedures, discuss clinical issues and raise doubts about family histories and current symptoms.
• E-Prescribing: Seamlessly enable digital medication records to integrate and follow when new patients visit. Provide an easy medication management module to providers for simplified access to patients’ medical histories and medications they are currently taking.
• Medical Billing: Alleviate pressures related to error-prone billing by facilitating digital medical billing tools for reduced operational costs and improved invoicing statements and superbill generation. Maintain, update and store patient files for handling billing with greater accuracy and absolutely no hassle to double-check minute details, including contact information, payment figures and billing methods.

Limitations

• Steep learning curve.
• Inactive customer support.
• Frequent system lags and glitches.

Where Epic is better for enterprise organizations, DrChrono is more suitable for solo and small practices. Its focus is on small hospitals, clinics and individual practices with a limited budget that can’t afford something as large as Epic.

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eClinicalWorks

eClinicalWorks offers a comprehensive model for health record handling and administration management. Across the entire patient life cycle on both the clinical and clerical sides of a business, this software solution helps providers achieve performance goals, discover key efficiencies and optimize operations. This leaves physicians and practice leaders free to focus on what matters: quality care for patients.

Use eClinicalWork’s patient portal to view, edit and update treatment files, progress notes and patient histories.

Top 5 Highest-rated Modules:

• Clinical Workflows Management – 100
• Collaboration – 100
• Medical Billing – 96
• Patient Engagement – 94
• Platform Capabilities – 94

Benefits

• Improve Accuracy: Streamline repetitive, redundant and time-intensive clerical tasks, including making individual patient files, updating records, filling out forms and writing prescriptions by automating them using an organized and efficient system. Use digital documentation methods to simplify routine administrative and clinical duties for fewer errors and enhanced data accuracy.
• Achieve Information Security: Have the right to decide where a provider can contact a patient to keep each piece of shared information safe and protected from unauthorized parties. Encrypt medical records to limit access without prior permission.
• Enhance Efficiency: Enable faster data entry using customizable dashboards, templates and widgets to electronically document patient notes, treatment forms, medication prescriptions and treatment files. Facilitate online patient portals for patients to receive automated appointment and billing alerts, thereby saving staff time.

Features

• Scheduling: Focus your efforts on excellent care delivery and patient engagement by allowing staff to automate all scheduling tasks. Enable online portals for patients to book and cancel appointments at their convenience directly.
• Revenue Cycle Management: Access daily revenue records at a touch of a button using electronic revenue cycle management tools. Observe business operations, enhance communication clarity, review daily profit and gain deeper visibility into monetary records by digitizing your current system.

Limitations

• Difficulty in processing payments.
• A minimum commitment of 5 years is required.
• Charges extra fees for integrations.

Where Epic offers a decent computerized physician order entry (CPOE) feature, eClinicalWorks offers a robust and seamless workflow that carries ICD-10 orders from the physician’s desk to the billing office in a single interface.

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AdvancedMD

AdvancedMD is a cloud-based software solution in an era of digital decision support – this EHR product helps practices and hospitals worldwide to stay on top of administrative duties and build great provider-patient relationships. This resource is aimed at helping a broad spectrum of medical record handling businesses succeed in clinical and financial documentation and record-keeping.

Accurately track bills and payments using AdvancedMD’s electronic claim management tool.

Top 5 Highest-rated Modules:

• E-Prescriptions – 100
• Patient Engagement – 97
• Clinical Workflows Management – 95
• Mobile EHR – 93
• Medical Billing – 92

Benefits

• Improve Information Safety: Protect sensitive data, including health care records, medical files and patient treatment notes, as your top priority. Use a HIPAA-compliant interoperability structure to exchange any and every piece of information with utmost security and confidentiality.
• Enhance Patient Engagement: Use patient portals to collaborate between patients and providers for enhanced patient experiences. Add process automations, including appointment reminders, message notifications and refill requests to streamline and simplify day-to-day patient interactions.

Features

• E-Prescribing: Enable providers to favorite preferred medical prescriptions. Display medication options on a side panel to reduce errors or confusion between two drugs with similar spellings. Flag potential drug interactions using electronic labels and widgets against patient allergies. Pull up medication histories and current patient treatment data in just a few clicks.
• Patient Portal: Ease staff workflow by providing an extra communication tool between staff, providers and patients. Enable self-appointment scheduling, data collection and treatment discussion seamlessly without any involvement of human errors.
• Dashboard: Assemble scattered data in a unified space to save time and keep track of each patient file with just a button click. Save practice time and money by labeling high-priority tasks to substantially improve health care quality.

Limitations

• Paid training material and demo videos.
• Integrations can be challenging.
• Unresponsive customer service.

AdvancedMD’s e-prescribing tool offers portable, accurate prescribing features like Epic. The difference is that AdvancedMD does so with a user-friendly interface that doesn’t require physicians and staff to perform as many unnecessary clicks.

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The Final Word

Epic makes great systems, but it definitely isn’t the right fit for everyone. These diverse alternatives all offer unique features that cater to different niches and specialties. The main thing these Epic competitors have in common is their interoperability and user-friendliness. If you want a more in-depth comparison of these systems, check out this EMR comparison report.

Do you use Epic? How do you feel about it? Do you have more questions about how we analyze EMR systems? Leave us a question in the comments.