Market research shows the best EMR/EHR digital platform depends on where it’s being deployed and what you especially want it to do.
Health system priorities such as integrated care, virtual models and interoperability are increasingly influencing how EMR and EHR platforms are rated by Australian health leaders, according to new research.
US market research firm, Black Book Market Research LLC released its State of Australian Healthcare IT 2026: Strategic Fit of Acute-Care EMR/EHR Platforms report earlier this month, showing Dedalus (ORBIS/webPAS/MedChart), Oracle Health, Alicidion Miya Precision, Epic, InterSystems and Orion Health were highly rated by health service leaders in the field.
“Ultimately, the State of Australian Healthcare IT 2026 findings confirm that strategic context matters as much as product capability,” the report said.
“The EMR/EHR platform that is the best fit for one Australian health system may be suboptimal for another.”
The market research report tapped the experience of 454 Australian hospital and health service professionals who used EMRs/EHRs in their clinical, digital/IT and executive roles, with the majority of them frontline doctors (32%), followed by nurses and midwives (24%), digital health/informatics leaders (20%), pharmacists and allied health (12%), executive (7%) and health information managers and quality safety roles (5%).
They said their choices were influenced by their consideration of consolidation of platforms, virtual/out-of-hospital care expansion into mainstream operations, My Health Record modernisation and interoperability, cloud-first and managed service delivery models for core clinical systems, embedded (not add-on) analytics and AI, board-level cyber resilience expectations, and design requirements around digital front door and shared decision-making consumer expectations.
“Australia’s next EMR cycle is not a software refresh, it is unequivocally a whole-of-system platform decision, and the determining factors are interoperability, resilience, and data governance at scale,” said Douglas Brown, Black Book Market Research LLC.
“Health service boards are now demanding proof that a platform can move real-time clinical and operational signals across LHD/HHS boundaries, sustain safe-mode continuity through cyber events or outages, and deliver an AI-ready data layer without locking organisations into bespoke technical debt.
“My Health Record connectivity is baseline infrastructure; differentiation comes from the architecture and operating model that makes it secure, usable, and clinically frictionless in day-to-day care.”
The report measured 13 digital clinical acute-care EMR/HER platforms against 18 benchmarks (“qualitative strategic fit dimensions”) which covered:
- clinical workflow usability and medicines management
- patient administration and operational backbone
- interoperability with my health record and other national services
- open-standards integration and vendor-neutrality
- data and analytics readiness
- scalability, safety, resilience and business continuity; and
- partnership value and long-term strategic alignment
across four domains/dimensions:
- clinical and operational effectiveness;
- interoperability, data and innovation;
- resilience, scalability and governance; and
- partnership, value and strategic alignment
in four operating environments:
- public health systems and major public hospitals;
- regional, rural and smaller public hospitals;
- private acute and day hospitals; and
- ambulance, retrieval and hospital-based emergency services.
The expert panel said the dimensions considered addressed frontline burden and safety, including clinician workload, staff burnout and platform usability, and a focus on medication safety and closed-loop medicines management. And they emphasised the important of My Health Record and national interoperability, as well as reflecting real-world risk of outages, cybersecurity incidence and scaling.
Clinician workflow fit and usability, and medication safety, were topmost in respondents’ priority list, followed by interoperability and reliability.
Related
The Australian experts who contributed to these ratings noted that they also had other considerations when it came to choosing an EMR/EHR (though they did not outweigh the dimensions above and were not included in ratings). These were:
- specialty content depth and out-of-the-box clinical content;
- population health and risk stratification capabilities;
- research, clinical trials and data re-use enablement;
- multi-organisation care coordination and shared record support; and
- upgrade cadence, backward compatibility and disruption management
From the 13 platforms evaluated, Dedalus (ORBIS / webPAS / MedChart) led on medication safety, open standards, integration with existing PAS/pharmacy systems, and total cost/partnership value. It was rated first for clinical & operational effectiveness and partnership/value in regional, rural and smaller public hospitals and in private acute and day hospitals; and resilience/governance and partnership/value in major public systems where Dedalus PAS and eMeds are already embedded
Oracle Health led in the dimensions of enterprise data platform and analytics readiness, safety/reliability, and alignment with digital health roadmaps. It was rated first for clinical & operational effectiveness in public health systems & major public hospitals; andresilience/governance in private acute/day and ambulance/ED environments.
Alcidion Miya Precision led in in the dimensions of prehospital/virtual care and innovation in clinical decision support and user experience. It rated first in three domains for ambulance, retrieval and hospital-based emergency services.
Epic led in the dimensions of clinician workflow fit and change/adoption support. InterSystems TrakCare and IntelliCare scored well in the dimension of interoperability and performed consistently across domains, especially in mixed metro-regional services.
And Telstra Health Krya Clinical and Orion Health led in the dimensions of localisation, client support and interoperability with My Health Record.
“[I]t is important to recognise that being the top-rated vendor on a single dimension does not mean that vendor is the ‘best overall EMR’,” the report cautioned.
“The individual dimensions (Q1–Q18) are narrowly defined lenses such as clinician workflow, medicines management, data platform readiness or client support responsiveness. A vendor that scores first on one dimension may be only marginally ahead of others or may perform less strongly on other dimensions that are critical for a particular organisation. The ‘wins’… should therefore be read as signposts of relative strength, not as definitive rankings of overall quality.
“A small number of vendors do not lead any one dimension individually but may still perform solidly across multiple dimensions without being the absolute top scorer in any single one. The key takeaway is that no vendor “owns” the entire strategic landscape; rather, each occupies a set of strengths.”
Furthermore, a leader in one operational environment was not necessarily so in another, the authors said. And differences between rankings were often small, with platforms tightly clustered.
The best platform was the one that worked in a health organisation’s specific operational environment, across the dimensions most important to that organisation, they said.
Read the full report for details on the market research company’s assessment of strategic role, narrative overview, strategic fit summary, and capability/customer evidence/momentum of each platform vendor.
