A review tells you about one practice's experience of one version of a product at one moment, written by somebody with a reason to write. That is not nothing: read enough of them and the repeated failures stand out, and repeated failures are genuinely hard to discover any other way. What a review cannot tell you is whether the product fits your specialty, your billing arrangement or your interfaces, because the reviewer's practice is not yours.
Filter before you read
Practice size and specialty first, then date. A twelve-provider group and a two-provider clinic are describing different products under one name, and a review from three versions ago is describing software that no longer exists. If the site you are reading will not let you filter on size and specialty, its average score is not about you and should not move anything on your sheet.
Read for repeats, not for sentiment
One furious review is a bad week. The same specific complaint from six different practices across eighteen months is a product characteristic, and it is exactly what you want. Write each repeat down as a question, take it into the demo, and ask the vendor to show you the workflow the reviewers describe. What you see there goes on the sheet with a score and a note; the review itself never does.
Know why the review exists
Some reviews are incentivised with a gift card, some are collected by the vendor from happy customers at renewal, and some sites rank by who pays for placement. None of that makes a review worthless, but it changes what a five-star average means. Treat the one and two star reviews as the useful half, because nobody is incentivised to write those.
Questions people ask about emr review
Does Siftvo publish EMR reviews?
No. We publish no review, no ranking and no vendor score of our own. The sheet on this site produces one score, and it comes from your requirements and your weighting.
How much should a review move a score?
Nothing directly. A review earns a question; the demo answer earns the score. That rule keeps somebody else's practice out of your decision.
Are vendor reference calls better than reviews?
They are different and both are useful. Add one question to a reference call: what did you nearly choose instead, and why did you not. It is rarely rehearsed and it is the most informative minute of the call.