Switching EHR Systems : The Real Criteria for Assessing Migration ROI

Beyond the sticker price, how do you measure the true profitability of an EHR switch? Discover the key metrics for assessing migration ROI,

Tanguy Bertogliati Growth Marketer

Updated on

26/3/2026

Key Takeaways

Key Indicator	Galeon Performance	Strategic Context
Annual Financial Gain (800 beds)	~ €2.9M per year	Estimated gain based on real Galeon deployment data, scaled by bed count.
Return on Investment (ROI)	~ 2 months	Record payback period observed after full transition to the Galeon ecosystem.
Documented Levers	Revenue & IT Optimization	UHCD emergency billing, additional day-hospital revenues, AI-corrected PMSI under-coding, and VM savings.
Medical Time Recovered	+19 days / year / caregiver	Time currently lost to administrative tasks redirected back to direct patient care.
Interactive Tool	Free ROI Calculator	Allows any institution to estimate its own specific ROI based on its bed count.

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Introduction : Your Current EHR Costs More Than You Think

Most institutions considering an EHR change frame the question around migration costs. This is the wrong lens. The right question is not "how much will the migration cost?" but "how much is staying on my current system costing me every year?"

A first-generation EHR generates silent, systematic losses: unvalorised acts, miscoded emergency stays, oversized IT infrastructure, caregiver time absorbed by administrative tasks. These losses appear on no explicit budget line, they dissolve into the overall operating cost, invisible, year after year.

Galeon built an ROI calculator to surface them. This article details the mechanics, criterion by criterion.

The Four ROI Levers : What the Galeon Calculator Measures

The Galeon ROI calculator is built on four axes of gain, each documented by academic sources or real deployment data. Here is what each covers and why it tends to be overlooked in standard budget analyses.

1. UHCD Emergency Billing: A Structural Revenue Gap

The Unité d'Hospitalisation de Courte Durée (UHCD), the short-stay emergency unit, allows emergency visits that exceed a defined duration threshold to be billed as a full inpatient stay, at a significantly higher rate than a standard consultation. This reclassification only triggers if the patient record is correctly structured at the point of care.

Without an intelligent EHR, a large share of these visits is never coded as UHCD stays. The resulting revenue gap can represent several hundred thousand euros per year depending on institution size. For an 800-bed hospital, the Galeon calculator estimates this recoverable gain at €845,000 per year.

This is where Galeon's AI-powered automatic billing operates: from the moment of clinical data entry, the AI analyses the nature and duration of the visit, identifies UHCD-eligible situations, and automatically structures the record to enable correct valorisation with no additional action required from the caregiver.

2. Day Hospital : Uncaptured Additional Revenues

The day hospital is another systematically under-exploited revenue source in institutions with legacy or poorly configured EHR systems. Correct structuring of ambulatory stays is a prerequisite for their T2A valorisation.

For an 800-bed hospital, the Galeon calculator estimates recoverable additional revenues on day-hospital activity at €310,000 per year, based on real Galeon deployment data scaled by bed count.

3. PMSI Under-Coding: €1.3M Lost Every Year for an 800-Bed Hospital

This is the highest-volume lever and the most thoroughly documented. Clinical under-coding is a systemic phenomenon in French hospitals. Two structural causes explain it : clinicians do not code with the same exhaustiveness as DIM (health information management) teams, and traditional EHR systems do not help them do so.

The data is precise. Two French university hospitals analysed in EMOIS 2022 show that transitioning from clinician coding to DIM coding increases the Average Value per Treated Case (VMCT) by +13 to +22%, depending on the service. The average measured gain is €1,470 per re-coded stay. European benchmarks compiled by Care Insight confirm a potential of +3 to +8% additional T2A revenues in the 18 months following AI EHR deployment. The Galeon calculator deliberately positions its estimate at the lower end of this range, approximately 3%, to remain conservative.

Galeon's AI detects and corrects this under-coding automatically, from the point of entry. It suggests missing codes, flags valorisable acts that were omitted, and structures stays to maximise their accurate T2A valorisation without adding workload for medical teams.

For an 800-bed hospital, this single lever represents an estimated €1.3M in annual gain.

4. IT Infrastructure: Releasing the VMs Allocated to the EHR

EHR infrastructure cost is the most invisible of all and one of the heaviest. On average, 70% of a hospital's virtual machines are allocated to the EHR, at an average cost of €1,700/VM/year (including HDS hosting, electricity consumption, security, backups, and 24/7 support). This figure is drawn from data from two comparable public hospitals, each with approximately 1,800 beds.

For a 1,000-bed hospital, this typically represents between €400,000 and €600,000 in annual infrastructure cost directly attributable to the EHR. At 800 beds, the Galeon calculator estimates 311 releasable VMs, generating an annual infrastructure saving of €529,000.

Switching to Galeon's SaaS model hosted on HDS-certified datacenters transfers all of these costs entirely to the vendor. Hosting, maintenance, automatic updates, contractually guaranteed high availability, cybersecurity: all included. IT teams are freed to focus on higher-value projects.

Caregiver Time: 19 Days Per Year Returned to Each Professional

Beyond direct financial gains, migration to Galeon produces a measurable effect on caregiver time. The underlying data comes from several independent sources:

35% of a caregiver's time is currently spent on administrative tasks (Medscape 2024, Higgins 2016)
A systematic review covering 28 studies (ScienceDirect, 2018) shows that an AI EHR reduces documentation time by –24.5%, equivalent to approximately 38 minutes recovered per caregiver per day
DREES (2022) counts an average of 2 clinical caregivers per bed in French hospitals

These three parameters combined produce the figure displayed in the calculator: 19 days per caregiver per year freed from administrative work. This time returned to caregivers is not merely a qualitative gain, it is additional care capacity, a measurable reduction in burnout risk, and a concrete argument for medical staff recruitment and retention.

What the Numbers Add Up To

Aggregating the four documented levers above, the Galeon calculator yields the following for an 800-bed hospital:

Optimization Lever	Estimated Annual Gain
UHCD emergency billing optimisation	€845,000
Additional day-hospital revenues	€310,000
AI-corrected PMSI under-coding	€1,300,000
IT infrastructure — VMs released	€529,000
Total estimated annual gain	€2,984,000

Source: real data from a Galeon deployment at an 800-bed public hospital, scaled by bed count. PMSI estimate based on the lower bound of Care Insight benchmarks (~3% additional T2A revenues).

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All projections are adjustable : the Galeon calculator scales every estimate to your institution's actual bed count, from 100 to 4,000 beds.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why migrate to a SaaS EHR when we already have one?

An on-premise EHR represents a permanent and growing infrastructure cost: server refresh every five years, licensing, 24/7 IT on-call, HDS and ISO 27001 certifications to maintain, technical rooms to operate. Moving to SaaS eliminates all of these line items. Galeon takes on HDS hosting, security, updates, and regulatory compliance at no additional annual cost to the institution.

How long does a Galeon deployment take?

Galeon deploys progressively, service by service. The first departments can go live within a few months. A full institution-wide deployment at an 800-bed hospital typically takes 9 to 18 months depending on the complexity of the existing information system. Hôpital Saint Joseph Marseille (800 beds, 3,000 staff) committed to a 9-month full deployment timeline.

Is Galeon's EHR compliant with France's Ségur du numérique?

Yes. Galeon is HDS-certified, ISO 27001-compliant, and natively integrates DMP and MSSanté interoperability as required under the Ségur Numérique framework.

Does AI-powered automatic billing require any action from caregivers?

No. Galeon's AI operates on clinical data entered through the normal care workflow. It suggests appropriate codes and structures stays without any additional step for medical or administrative teams.

Calculate the ROI of migrating your EHR to Galeon

Here

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