Hospitals Remain Underinvested in Costing Technologies, Black Book ERP Survey Results

Value-based care is sending providers back to the costing basics in 2017 to maximize savings and fully monitor population health outcomes.

Tampa, FL, December 13, 2016 (Newswire.com) - ​​​An inert healthcare enterprise resource planning software sector grew less than 2 percent in 2015 as hospitals turned available technology funding to conflicting priorities such as ICD 10 conversions, cybersecurity, population health and analytics, with less than 29 percent of all US hospitals having implemented any ERP product.

As provider executives face compounding value-based risk decisions, recent interest in ERP has climbed sharply according to a recent Black Book survey of 1,158 health system procurement and technology leaders in the fourth quarter of 2016.

More than a third (35 percent) of those organizations with implemented ERP systems reported having to defer maintenance and/or delayed upgrades over the past three years leaving many hospital ERPs nearly obsolete.

“Crucial back-end software that manages finance, supply chain and inventory management, purchasing, payroll and coding have been disregarded into a confused entanglement of different products that don’t communicate and left executives with the inability to realize cost savings in preparation of value based care,” said Doug Brown, Managing Partner of Black Book. “There has been user opposition to deploying a new or upgraded ERP, perceived as carrying a high price tag in a time when clinical deployments overwhelmed hospital staff and budgets.”

57 percent of the C-suite executives surveyed admitted not having a deep understanding of the impact or complexity of their supply chain until the reality of value-based care set in this year with the emphasis on accountability to properly measure and compare medical costs with outcomes.

“In a payment environment that reimburses for value, it has become more critical to understand exactly how much it costs to deliver patient care,” said Brown. “Clumsy costing based on uncoordinated data will become perilous for hospitals at risk.”

Supplies accounted for 30.5 percent of the average hospital’s annual operating budget in 2016 as reported by survey respondents. 

Finding new methods of understanding true costs per case and per episode of care have providers returning to ERP system basics to move confidently to a valued based model.  

69 percent of IT leaders polled claim they will prioritize their supply chains in 2017 as among the most valuable asset for actionable data mining before overburdening their organizations with population health and sophisticated analytics tools.

ERP vendor market share was limited to only a handful of vendors prior to 2013, but the dramatic demand for cloud ERP and the amount of hospitals not using an ERP system has produced a spurt of new ERP vendors as older systems retool products or edge closer to obsolescence.

“As the industry emphases the identification and capture of all costs to determine the actual cost of care, the implementation of newer ERP technologies and advanced costing methods has changed administrator’s strategic technology plans," said Brown.  "Patients cannot receive high quality care without proper cohesion of supply chain, human resources, finance and operational systems with clinical data as it all comes down to outcomes."

Cloud ERP solutions produced the highest client experience scores for healthcare organizations including speed in implementations and scalable total costs according to Black Book results.

“92 percent of survey respondents recognize that the ERP of healthcare future is mobile and it’s in the cloud with secure networking and analytics built in”, said Brown. “The idea is that you have general ledger, accounts payable, budgeting, forecasting and cash management all accessible anywhere, whether in the operating room, purchasing, or in administration."

The Top Healthcare ERP rated vendors for 2017 are in order of client experience and product satisfaction scoring are:

1. Oracle/Oracle ERP Cloud

2. Cerner/Siemens ERP

3. Workday

4. Microsoft Dynamics

5. McKesson

6. SAP

7. IBM Watson

8. Infor/Infor Cloud Suite

Also receiving client ballots were MEDITECH, CPSI, Sage, Intacct, Harris Healthcare/Affinity, and MEDHOST.

Cerner and Oracle also received the highest client loyalty and retention rankings from currently installed customers.

Other key findings:

86 percent of materials management leaders outsourced supply chain functions to medical and surgical supply distributors. 93 percent also state they do not suffer from any significant supply chain problems such as product delivery issues.

93 percent of materials managers state their organizations suffer from poor inventory control technology and processes that typically end up with overstocking, high supply and labor costs and frustrated nursing staff.

According to the 2016 Black Book technology satisfaction survey of nurses, clinical staff spends an average of 34 percent of their time on supply related tasks such as locating products.

72 percent of current ERP users state that their ERP modules in place are too difficult to use.  15 percent believe their current ERP product will be obsolete by 2019.

84 percent of respondents report they currently cannot segment patients based on spending, complexity or resources to adequately price for 2017 value-based initiatives.

88 percent of CFOs responding with 2017 ERP replacements or purchase goals see cloud solutions as the preferred product for their organization.

About Black Book

Black Book™, its founders, management and staff do not own or hold any financial interest in any of the ERP vendors covered and encompassed in the surveys it conducts. Black Book reports the results of the collected satisfaction and client experience rankings in publication and to media prior to vendor notification of rating results and does not solicit vendor participation fees, review fees, inclusion or briefing charges, consultation requirements, and/or vendor collaboration as Black Book polls vendors’ clients.

Since 2000, Black Book™ has polled the vendor satisfaction across over thirty industries in the software/technology and managed services sectors around the globe including ERP. In 2009, Black Book began polling the client experience of now over 540,000 healthcare software and services users. Black Book expanded its survey prowess and reputation of independent, unbiased crowd-sourced surveying to IT and health records professionals, physician practice administrators, nurses, financial leaders, executives and hospital information technology managers.

For methodology, auditing, resources, comprehensive research and ERP vendor ranking data see: http://www.blackbookmarketresearch.com