14 Health Systems Renew EHR Contracts with Altera
Fourteen health systems have recently extended their EHR contracts with Altera Digital Health. The renewals indicate continued market confidence in EHR platforms beyond the largest vendors. This market activity provides context for the competitive landscape in which major EHRs like Epic operate.
- Altera Digital Health, formerly the hospital business segment of Allscripts, holds approximately 3.4% of the acute care hospital EHR market share, compared to major players like Epic (37.7%) and Oracle Health/Cerner (21.7%). The renewed contracts for its Sunrise EHR platform include health systems like Phoenix Children's, St. Mary's, and Hospital for Special Care. - The Sunrise EHR platform is designed for large clinical enterprises and includes features for integrated medication management, a radiology module, and decision support to amalgamate patient data. Altera's recent Sunrise 25.1 update introduced approximately 700 enhancements, including a native AI scribe, a mobile patient engagement platform, and an intelligent faxing solution. - For community and rural hospitals, Altera offers the Paragon EHR, an integrated acute and ambulatory platform. The newer, cloud-native version, Paragon Denali, is built on Microsoft Azure and designed to reduce downtime and improve scalability for smaller facilities. - Transitioning from an ICU role to nursing informatics often requires specific credentials, such as the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) Nursing Informatics Certification (RN-BC). Eligibility for this certification typically includes a BSN, two years of RN experience, recent continuing education in informatics, and a minimum number of practice hours in the field. - A common complaint from frontline nurses about EHRs is that they are physician-centric, leading to click fatigue and redundant data entry. In a survey by Black Book Research, over two-thirds of nurses stated that poor EHR usability and the burden of digital documentation contribute to job dissatisfaction. - Interoperability, the ability of different IT systems to exchange data, is a critical concept in health IT, addressed by standards like HL7 and FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources). FHIR is a modern standard that uses web-based APIs to allow for more flexible and real-time data sharing between systems, which is a cornerstone of the 21st Century Cures Act. - AI is increasingly being integrated into clinical decision support (CDS) tools in acute care to help with tasks like predicting patient deterioration and streamlining medical documentation. However, the widespread adoption of AI in critical care is still hindered by challenges related to ethics, data validation, and integration into existing EHR workflows. - EHR optimization strategies for nursing include simplifying documentation templates, reducing alarm fatigue by tailoring alert sensitivity, and customizing order sets. Gathering direct feedback from nursing staff through surveys, workflow observations, and analyzing click counts for common tasks is a key first step in identifying areas for improvement.
