Out of seventeen companies, OmniMD( A Division of Integrated Systems Inc.) received the highest overall 5-Star rating. The GE Centricity new integrated product is expected to also become a 5-star rated product. Five important caveats to keep in mind as you review the results:

• Literally hundreds of products are identified as EMRs, and while a good faith effort was made to contact as many vendors as possible, many chose not to respond.
• The survey findings are self-reported, that is, they are based on what vendors said about their own products.
• Fourteen vendors were required to participate in face-to-face demonstrations of their product’s functionality in order to receive “validation”. The validation process tested more than 200 scenarios. A number of the vendors have not been tested as of this report and therefore have an (*) next to their company name.
• A few of the highly visible EMR vendors elected NOT to participate in the survey. Many of these vendors are not willing to document their functionality in writing, while others state that either they do not participate in surveys or they were too busy to participate.
• Starting in May of 2005, AC Group added a “confidence factor” which indicates AC Group’s confidence in the vendor’s reported rakings. A vendor with a 5-Star confidence level indicates that their product has been tested and we believe that more than 90% of their answers are validated. A vendor with a 3-Star confidence level indicates that the product has been tested at least once and we are confident that over 70% of the responses are validated. A vendor with a 1-Star confidence level indicates that AC Group has NOT been able to evaluate the vendor’s claims as of this report.

When evaluating functionality by different methods of input, the AC Group team determined that today’s technology allows end-users the same functionality no matter where they are located. In 95% of the cases, the vendor’s application functioned the same on the desktop, from remote locations, and from a wireless tablet. Therefore, the EMR evaluation team was able to consolidate Desktop, Remote and Wireless functionality into one rating. The only major difference was the functionality on a PDA device – given that the screen size is limited. Therefore the EMR team created a separate rating for PDA devices. Simply stated, a number of the vendors that were highly ranked for the triad of desktop, remote and wireless, either did not offer a portable device or had one with limited functionality. When their overall performance ranking included low or nil scores for PDA their ranking dropped, precipitously.