New research published in Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) looked at the relationship between electronic health record (EHR) vendors and meaningful use (MU) performance of hospitals and sought to establish if all certified EHRs were created equal. The federal EHR certification process was intended to ensure a baseline level of system quality and the ability to support meaningful use criteria. Researchers sought to assess whether there was variation across EHR vendors in the degree to which hospitals using products from those vendors were able to achieve high levels of performance on meaningful use criteria. Researchers calculated how much variation in performance is explained by vendor choice and found significant associations between specific vendor and level of hospital performance for all 6 meaningful use criteria. Research findings show vendor choice accounts for a meaningful proportion of variation in hospital meaningful use performance, and specific vendors are consistently associated with higher or lower performance across criteria.
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