KLAS Research
KLAS Research is a health care technology research firm headquartered in Pleasant Grove, Utah, in the United States. Founded in 1996, it syndicates vendor-performance ratings based on interviews with thousands of health care providers and payers. Where a general news agency gathers reports from correspondents, KLAS gathers structured judgments from the customers of health care software and services — hospitals, clinics and insurers that use electronic health records, imaging systems, revenue cycle tools and hundreds of other products — and publishes those judgments as scores, rankings and market reports. Its best-known output, the annual Best in KLAS awards, is treated across the health information technology industry as a standard public verdict on which vendors their own customers rate most highly.
Founding in 1996
KLAS was founded by Kent Gale. According to a profile of the firm's origins, Gale was working in Tucson, Arizona, for Sunquest Information Systems, a laboratory information systems company, in 1996 when the company's post-IPO discussions about becoming financially stronger, including possible support reductions, prompted an idea: it would be interesting, and useful, to measure vendors on how well they keep their commitments to customers. Gale left Sunquest in July 1996 and spent the next few months creating a 130-question questionnaire, which he brought to the HIMSS conference in 1997. Each question sought performance information from providers about the products they were using. It took between a year and a half and two years, by his account, to gather enough information to compare the major players, and within about three years the firm had a revenue stream and was established. The company was formerly known as KLAS Enterprises before operating as KLAS Research.
Mission and method
KLAS states that it has provided insights for the health care IT industry since 1996 and that its mission is to improve the world's health care by amplifying the voice of providers and payers. That phrasing describes its method accurately. KLAS researchers conduct confidential interviews and surveys with people who use the products being rated, screen responses for bias, and convert the results into comparable scores. For the Best in KLAS process, eligible software and services are ranked by an overall performance score on a 100-point scale; for software products, the scores are based on customer responses to a set of numeric ratings questions and yes-or-no questions, weighted equally. A market segment must contain at least two fully rated solutions before a Best in KLAS award is given in it, and some segments carry additional criteria. The firm emphasizes that awards cannot be won through nominations or applications; they are earned through the year-long evaluation of customer feedback.
Best in KLAS
The Best in KLAS report, published annually as Best in KLAS Awards: Software & Services, is the firm's flagship syndicated product. Each year KLAS makes thousands of proactive calls and interviews thousands of health care professionals to build the research behind it. The report ranks vendors across dozens of categories — electronic health records for acute and ambulatory care, radiology and imaging systems, practice management, patient engagement, consulting and IT services, data archiving and many others — and names the top-rated company in each segment. Winners receive the Best in KLAS distinction, signifying, in the firm's definition, leadership in meeting customer expectations in areas such as product quality, implementation, service and support, relationship and value. Because the rankings rest entirely on customer testimony, vendors publicize wins prominently, provider organizations use the reports when shortlisting products, and trade publications report the results each year as industry news.
Beyond the annual awards
The annual awards are only the most visible part of a continuous research operation. KLAS publishes market reports throughout the year on individual segments — studies of usability in ambulatory electronic records, of mobile health adoption and security concerns, of imaging vendors ranked by performance at different study volumes, and of emerging categories as technology changes. Older reports illustrate the breadth: a study of mobile applications drew on insights from more than one hundred providers and recorded their security concerns and the solutions they used, while the 2012 awards research drew on interviews with nearly 20,000 provider sources. The firm says the scope of its research is constantly expanding as technology becomes more sophisticated, and that it builds strong relationships with providers and payers to obtain data that is otherwise hard to get. It also offers consulting and advisory services alongside its syndicated reports, and serves providers, payers, vendors and investment and consulting firms that follow the health IT market.
The Arch Collaborative
A major extension of the firm's work is the KLAS Arch Collaborative, a community of health care organizations focused on the experience clinicians have with electronic health records. The Collaborative measures that experience with a Net EHR Experience Score, calculated on a scale running from negative 100 to positive 100, and recognizes member organizations in two ways: a Pinnacle Award for outstanding achievement, given to organizations reaching specified score thresholds for nurses or physicians, and a Breakthrough Recognition for organizations whose scores improve by at least fifteen points between measurements. KLAS publishes the Collaborative's aggregate benchmarks, including average scores across more than one hundred thousand nurse respondents and more than fifty thousand physician respondents, and holds a learning summit at which award winners are recognized. The Collaborative turns KLAS from a rater of vendors into an organizer of provider experience data, giving member organizations a shared measure of a problem — clinician frustration with electronic records — that no single hospital could benchmark on its own.
Utah base
KLAS is a Utah company. Company records place its headquarters in Pleasant Grove, Utah, and earlier reporting frequently described it as based in Orem, a neighboring Utah County city, reflecting its long presence in the Provo–Orem area south of Salt Lake City. Utah County is home to a cluster of health care and software companies, and KLAS grew there rather than in a coastal media or consulting center. Its events reflect the base: the Arch Collaborative Learning Summit referenced in its award materials has been held in Salt Lake City. From that base, the firm's research reach is national and increasingly international, with Best in KLAS reporting that includes global categories and winners recognized for performance in regions including Asia, Oceania and Europe.
Leadership and the Gale family
The firm's public voice has consistently come from the Gale family. Kent Gale founded the company after leaving Sunquest, and Adam Gale has been quoted for many years as KLAS president and, in more recent award announcements, as its chief executive, presenting the Best in KLAS results and explaining what they mean. In a 2026 award statement, Adam Gale described the awards as recognizing vendors who consistently deliver excellence through partnership with health care organizations, and said KLAS is honored to amplify the voice of providers and payers. Other executives appear in the firm's collaborative work: Steve Low, identified as KLAS president in Arch Collaborative award coverage, has presented those awards and described them as being about progress rather than competition. The continuity of leadership helps explain the firm's consistent positioning as an honest broker — accurate, honest and impartial are the words its own descriptions repeat — in a market where vendors and buyers often dispute each other's claims.
How the industry uses KLAS
KLAS data enters public circulation in several ways. Vendors cite their scores and awards in their own announcements; hospitals and physician groups use reports in purchasing decisions; investors and consultants track segment reports for signs of market movement; and health care trade publications — including hospital, imaging and long-term care outlets — report KLAS findings as news, from PACS rankings to services awards. The comparison often made for the firm is to consumer ratings organizations: just as car buyers consult independent rankings, health care buyers consult KLAS because individual organizations cannot interview thousands of peers themselves. By collecting those interviews centrally and syndicating the results, KLAS performs for health IT the aggregation function that a wire service performs for news.
Standing and limits
KLAS's standing rests on a methodological claim that its scores reflect customers rather than vendor marketing, and on nearly three decades of continuous publication since 1996. Its rankings measure customer experience and vendor performance as reported by users; they are not laboratory tests of software, and the firm itself screens samples and sets eligibility rules to keep comparisons fair. Within those limits, KLAS Research has become the standard syndicated source on health care technology vendor performance in the United States, a Pleasant Grove firm whose annual awards and collaborative benchmarks are cited throughout the industry it measures.
