Epic Systems expands EHR market share lead over Oracle Health

Epic Systems, the most important 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, in keeping with a report from Klas Research on Wednesday.

Epic added a complete of 176 facilities and 29,399 beds in 2024, while Oracle lost 74 sites and 17,232 beds through the same period, the report said. For the primary time ever, Oracle declined to share a listing of latest contracts with Klas, a health-care IT research foundation. Klas said it estimated Oracle’s market share.

“Beyond strictly technological considerations, Epic’s fame for customer partnership has brought them to the forefront of most EHR considerations,” the report said.

Oracle and Epic didn’t immediately reply to CNBC’s request for comment.

EHRs are digital versions of a patient’s medical history which might be updated by doctors and nurses. The software sits at the middle of the trendy 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 scarcity of follow-through on guarantees” as their primary concerns with Oracle, Klas said. But there is a sense of “cautious optimism” following a few of the company’s recent technological developments, including latest 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 good spot.

Ellison spent numerous time on the topic in fireside chats at the corporate’s annual Oracle Health Summit in March. And on Oracle’s quarterly call with investors in September, Ellison said his company’s EHR is supplied 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 vp at Oracle, went after Epic, calling founder and CEO Judy Faulkner the “single biggest obstacle to EHR interoperability,” a term for the way different software systems exchange information.

But Oracle’s EHR software has been marred by outages and rocky deployments in recent times.

Oracle engineers mistakenly caused a five-day software outage at several Community Health Systems hospitals that was just cleared up this week. The facilities needed to activate downtime procedures and to temporarily return to paper-based patient records.

“Over the past decade, Epic has been the one vendor chosen by large health systems making go-forward EHR decisions, resulting in their consistent growth in market share,” the Klas report said. 

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