Antibiogram software for Altera Sunrise Clinical Manager hospitals, from the LIS export to a CLSI M39 report
Sunrise shows clinicians the culture results, but the susceptibility data behind them is verified in a separate lab system. That decides where a Sunrise hospital builds its antibiogram, who does the work and what it costs.
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A hospital on Altera Sunrise Clinical Manager builds its cumulative antibiogram from the laboratory information system that verifies its microbiology, not from Sunrise itself. The realistic routes are a report from that LIS finished in Excel, WHONET fed by a delimited export, a data warehouse report, or an antibiogram tool such as Antimicrobe that reads the same export and applies the CLSI M39 rules for you. Sunrise is already validated for NHSN AUR reporting, so the antibiogram is a separate purchase from the AU and AR files.
This is written for the stewardship pharmacist, pharmacy director or micro lab manager at a Sunrise hospital who owns the yearly antibiogram and has no analyst assigned to it. Altera is described only from its own public pages, SEC filings, the CDC vendor lists and KLAS public rankings.
Where Sunrise hospitals keep susceptibility results
Sunrise started as Eclipsys Sunrise Clinical Manager. Allscripts merged with Eclipsys in August 2010, and in May 2022 Allscripts sold its hospital business, Sunrise and Paragon included, for $670 million in cash to a Constellation Software subsidiary now called Altera Digital Health. Altera describes the current release, Sunrise 25.1, generally available since June 17, 2025, as a complete EHR for mid-size hospitals and health systems.
None of Altera's public Sunrise pages describes a laboratory module of its own or an antibiogram report. Altera sells a separate lab system, Altera Lab, as EHR-agnostic, and many Sunrise hospitals run a third-party LIS such as Sunquest or SCC Soft. Clinicians see culture results in Sunrise, but the susceptibility results are entered, verified and stored in the LIS.
A published example shows the pattern. In a 2016 Journal of Clinical Microbiology study from St. Joseph's Health Centre in Toronto (PMID 27385708), microbiology results were displayed in Eclipsys Sunrise Clinical Manager while the susceptibility data came from the SCC SoftMic laboratory system. When the team stopped reporting ciprofloxacin on susceptible E. coli urine isolates, ciprofloxacin use fell from 87 to 39 defined daily doses per 1,000 patient days. The stewardship lever was in the LIS, and so is the antibiogram data.
Four ways to build the antibiogram at a Sunrise hospital
The LIS report is where most Sunrise hospitals start, and it is where the M39 work goes missing: repeat isolates kept, preliminary results counted, small denominators printed as percentages. WHONET fixes the rules but asks someone to learn a Windows program once a year. A warehouse report is the best route for a system that already has an analyst on lab data and the worst for one that does not.
Sunquest sites will find the export steps on Sunquest LIS antibiogram software, and the rules themselves are on CLSI M39 antibiogram software.
| Route | Who does the work | CLSI M39 rules | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIS report plus Excel | Lab manager and pharmacist | Only what the sheet applies | Staff hours |
| WHONET with BacLink | Whoever learns WHONET | Yes, if configured | Free, paid in staff hours |
| Data warehouse or BI report | An analyst or report writer | Whatever the analyst codes | Analyst time and licenses |
| Antimicrobe | Pharmacist uploads a CSV | First isolate, final only, 30 isolate flag, by default | From $249 a month |
How to get the export for a Sunrise antibiogram
Ask the lab system administrator, not the Sunrise team, for one delimited file of finalized susceptibility results for the analysis period. Include a patient identifier (hashed is fine), collection date, nursing unit or location, specimen source, organism, antimicrobial and the released interpretation. Keep the unit column even if this year's report is house-wide only. ICU and urine cuts are the first thing a committee asks for next year.
We found no published BacLink template for Sunrise or Allscripts. That rarely matters, because the export comes from the LIS anyway, and a plain CSV from Sunquest, SCC SoftMic or Altera Lab is the same file Antimicrobe reads.
Is Sunrise validated for NHSN AUR reporting?
Yes. The CDC Antimicrobial Use vendor list, last reviewed June 24, 2026, shows Altera Sunrise Clinical Manager 22.1 and 25.1 as validated, and the Antimicrobial Resistance list, last reviewed May 12, 2026, shows versions 22.1 and 24.1. Check your own version against both lists, because AU and AR were validated on different releases.
NHSN reporting and the antibiogram start from the same final susceptibility results but answer different people. The AR file goes to the CDC. The antibiogram goes to prescribers, order sets and the stewardship committee, and no AUR module builds it for you.
The full validated list, vendor by vendor, is in NHSN AUR reporting software compared.
What KLAS and recent moves say about Sunrise
In the 2025 Best in KLAS ranking for acute care EHRs at hospitals over 400 beds, Altera Sunrise scored 52.3 across 13 organizations, against 89.2 for Epic, 75.5 for MEDITECH Expanse and 66.2 for Oracle Health. In the 151 to 400 bed segment Sunrise scored 71.5 across 6 organizations and was not ranked.
Some large sites are leaving. Johns Hopkins moved from Sunrise to Epic in July 2016, and Northwell Health, which deployed Sunrise in 2005, selected Epic in March 2023. Others are staying: Altera announced on February 24, 2026 that 14 clients had renewed Sunrise, naming Grand Lake Health System in Ohio, and Hospital for Special Care in Connecticut renewed through 2032.
For the antibiogram, either path argues for the same thing. A report built from a plain LIS export does not depend on the EHR, so it keeps its rules and its year-over-year trend through a Sunrise upgrade or an Epic cutover.
Hospitals planning an Epic move can compare the Epic routes in antibiogram software for Epic hospitals. Teams copying years of lab history into a warehouse before a cutover can use data lineage tracking to show where each column of the old data came from.
How much does antibiogram software cost for a Sunrise hospital?
Most Sunrise hospitals pay in staff hours, not license fees: a pharmacist and a lab manager spending days each January on the LIS report and the spreadsheet. Enterprise surveillance platforms that include an antibiogram, such as Sentri7 or TheraDoc, do not publish prices and are bought for alerts and AUR, not for the report alone.
Antimicrobe publishes its plans. Lab is $249 a month for one facility and 25,000 isolates a year, bought by card. Stewardship is $749 a month for up to three facilities with unit cuts, quarterly trends and MDRO counts. Network is $2,400 a month for a health system that wants one regional report plus each hospital's own, which is the usual shape of a multi-hospital Sunrise system.
Every limit is on the pricing page. Smaller Altera hospitals on Paragon have their own page, Paragon EHR antibiogram software.
Questions to ask before you choose
- Which system verifies our microbiology results, Sunrise or a separate LIS, and who can export from it?
- Does our current antibiogram keep only the first isolate per patient per period, and can we see the counts?
- Are preliminary or corrected results in the file, and who removes them?
- Which organisms have fewer than 30 isolates, and are we printing percentages on them?
- Will the report survive an EHR upgrade or a move to another EHR without being rebuilt?
- Who besides the person who built it can produce next year's report?
Related on this site: Sunquest LIS antibiogram software, Paragon EHR antibiogram software, antibiogram software for MEDITECH hospitals, CLSI M39 antibiogram software, Antimicrobe pricing.