The Top Ten Electronic Medical Record Vendors

(MoneyWatch)  Who are the leading healthcare IT vendors in the U.S.? No sweat if you don't know -- most of these companies are all but unknown outside of the healthcare field. Healthcare IT is in many ways its own cloistered little world, thanks in part to the complexity and regulatory requirements of medical-information systems -- not to mention a certain degree of incestuousness in the field.

With the federal government poised to spend $20 billion or more on healthcare IT as part of the economic-stimulus bill now before Congress, it's a good time to get to know these companies. And thanks to Modern Healthcare, here's a table of the ten largest makers of electronic medical records (although the magazine, for whatever reason, insists on calling them EHRs, or electronic health records).

The most striking thing to me is the degree of concentration within the sector. Meditech, a privately held Boston-area company, holds more than a quarter of the market; McKesson and Cerner, numbers 2 and 3 on the list, control another 27 percent. All told, the top six companies -- excluding in-house systems -- are responsible for three-quarters of the EHR installations in hospitals around the country.

Top vendors of acute-care EHR systems

Company	Location	Installations	Installation %
Meditech	Westwood, MA	1,185	26.6%
McKesson Provider Tech	Alpharetta, GA	630	14.1%
Cerner	Kansas City, MO	560	12.6%
Siemens Medical	Malvern, PA	425	9.5%
Self-developed	--	357	8.0%
CPSI	Mobile, AL	353	7.9%
Epic Systems	Madison, WI	265	6.0%
Eclipsys	Boca Raton, FL	243	5.5%
Healthcare Mgmt Systems	Nashville, TN	237	5.3%
Healthland	Glenwood, MN	198	3,8%

Source: HIMSS Analytics Database (h/t Modern Healthcare)

This data reflects EHR installations at 4,454 U.S. acute-care hospitals as of Jan. 2009.