Growth in the 2024 Best in KLAS Global Report

When we started the Global Best in KLAS report a decade ago, the awards were based on combined feedback from all regions outside of the US. But the goal has always been to expand our research so that we could better acknowledge strong vendor performance at the regional, subregional, or even country level.  

Publishing an increasingly granular look at the various global markets is simply better for provider organizations. It gives increased clarity on the vendors with an established presence selling in the region, and it shows which vendors are performing well.

2023’s Global Best in KLAS report broke the awards into five main regions: Canada, Europe, Middle East/Africa, Asia/Oceania, and Latin America. While these regional views are a large step forward from KLAS’ early efforts to measure vendors outside the US 10 years ago, the 2024 Best in KLAS Awards – Global Software report represents the next step forward for KLAS. This year, thanks to increased feedback, we were able to break the European region into five subregions: UK and Ireland, Northern Europe, DACH, France, and Southern Europe.

Improving Global Relationships

To grow this report, we knew we needed a lot more feedback in every region. So KLAS has been putting forth a lot of effort to increase our international relationships with providers. In general, we've broadened our network through our global summits held in Europe. Those events have given us the opportunity to meet in person with providers from many different countries.

To make giving feedback more accessible, we added more language support, enabling providers to give feedback in their native languages. This language support includes German, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French. While the Best in KLAS report is published in English, we are getting better at giving people the opportunity to let their voice be heard in their native language. These factors really made the difference for the European region this year.

What We’re Learning

Global Best in KLAS awards are given to the top-performing vendors in a given region. Best in KLAS winners often outperform their competition in several ways when it comes to customer relationships. The first is how they, or their reseller, meet basic support requests from customers in the country/region. We generally see that vendors who are Best in KLAS are better able to deal with those support requests in the local language. 

Being able to break the report out into more subregions and countries allowed us to see that top-performing vendors are also often better at meeting local regulations. The regional Best in KLAS awards in Europe allow for an apples-to-apples comparison of vendors against the same regional expectations. This comparison is not perfect, but the changes have allowed us to better highlight feedback from like-minded organizations on how well vendors meet their local needs.

Planning Ahead

KLAS continues to plan to build on this energy and break more regions into subregions as we get more data. It’s important to know that the Global Best in KLAS report, as a high-level report, is not the only research we’re publishing internationally. For example, every year we publish reports on EHR and PACS vendor performance around the world. Additionally, we have reports covering general healthcare IT trends, such as patient engagement, technology investment priorities, and cloud adoption.

Moving forward, we will continue to provide more detailed regional reports. For example, we have a report with insights on EPR solutions in the UK and Ireland. We want to publish a regional look for the DACH region and have the aim to publish it at least in part in German. This may be a lot of effort, but there is high demand, and KLAS is in a unique position to break down some geographic barriers.

What You Can Do

I recommend using the global Best in KLAS report  as a conversation starter with your vendors. If you see your vendor isn’t performing as well, ask them what they’re doing to improve. Or, if they are doing well, bring it up and ask what their plans are to continue to do well for their customers.

We’re very aware that we have some gaps and that we still have work to do. So, if you have a vendor that isn’t in the report, reach out to us. Give us your feedback about their solutions or services. We build each report using the feedback that we get, and we’d love to have your voice included so we can cover as many vendors as possible.

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