The eponymous sign outside Epic headquarters in Verona, Wisconsin.
Source: Yiem via Wikipedia CC
Epic Systems, the biggest electronic health records (EHR) vendor, notched its largest ever net gain in hospital market share on record in 2024, widening its lead over rival Oracle, according to a report from Klas Research on Wednesday.
Epic added a total of 176 facilities and 29,399 beds in 2024, while Oracle lost 74 sites and 17,232 beds during the same period, the report said. For the first time ever, Oracle declined to share a list of new contracts with Klas, a health-care IT research foundation. Klas said it estimated Oracle’s market share.
“Beyond strictly technological considerations, Epic’s reputation for customer partnership has brought them to the forefront of most EHR considerations,” the report said.
Oracle and Epic didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
EHRs are digital versions of a patient’s medical history that are updated by doctors and nurses. The software sits at the center of the modern U.S. health-care system. Oracle became the second-largest vendor behind privately held Epic in 2022 by acquiring the medical records giant Cerner for roughly $28 billion.
Health-care organizations have cited “poor partnership and a lack of follow-through on promises” as their primary concerns with Oracle, Klas said. But there’s a sense of “cautious optimism” following some of the company’s recent technological developments, including new artificial intelligence features and the brand-new EHR Oracle announced in October.
Based on recent comments from Oracle founder Larry Ellison, his company is in a favorable spot.
Ellison spent a lot of time on the subject in fireside chats at the company’s annual Oracle Health Summit in March. And on Oracle’s quarterly call with investors in September, Ellison said his company’s EHR is equipped with AI capabilities like transcription and order distribution that make it unique.
“Our user interface is so different than Epic’s,” he said.
In a blog post in May Ken Glueck, an executive vice president at Oracle, went after Epic, calling founder and CEO Judy Faulkner the “single biggest obstacle to EHR interoperability,” a term for how different software systems exchange information.
But Oracle’s EHR software has been marred by outages and rocky deployments in recent years.
Oracle engineers mistakenly caused a five-day software outage at several Community Health Systems hospitals that was just cleared up this week. The facilities had to activate downtime procedures and to temporarily return to paper-based patient records.
“Over the last decade, Epic has been the only vendor chosen by large health systems making go-forward EHR decisions, leading to their consistent growth in market share,” the Klas report said.
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