More than one in six providers currently using an electronic health record system has plans to change vendors within the next year.

Many of these providers are physician practices upgrading to meet meaningful use requirements or replacing a poorly-functioning system, but hospitals have increasingly been switching to new vendors as well. The financial and labor outlay required to change EHR systems is no small matter — meaning the hospitals contemplating a switch have very good reason to do so.

“There were a lot of outside forces that affected our decision,” says Lisa Moffett, health information manager of UHS Delaware Valley Hospital in Walton, N.Y., of her hospital’s decision to change EHRs in its physician practice. For example, Medinotes, the initial EHR system at UHS Delaware, didn’t meet meaningful use criteria. “Like every other hospital, we have those incentives on our minds,” she says, as well as the looming threat of noncompliance penalties. Click here to read the full article.