Epic to create app store for EHR add-ons
EHR vendor Epic Systems is getting ready to launch an app store for third-party developers to build add-ons for Epic’s core products.
The store, reportedly called App Exchange, is seen as Epic’s response to criticisms that the Verona, Wis.-based company has been a hindrance to interoperability of patient data for healthcare organizations using systems from different vendors, according to the Wisconsin State Journal.
The newspaper reported that Mark Bakken, former CEO of Epic specialist Nordic Consulting, spilled the news at a Tuesday meeting of the Wisconsin Innovation Network in Madison, and said that the store will go online in a few weeks. An Epic spokesperson confirmed the plan and the App Exchange name to the Journal, but did not elaborate. The privately held company does not issue press releases and often is media-shy.
Bakken likened the App Exchange to the Apple App Store, where Epic users will be able to find EHR extensions. He said that it should be a boon for health IT developers, including a number of Madison-area startups with Epic alumni. The former Nordic boss is establishing a venture fund to back such companies, the newspaper said.
“Once they officially launch this, then it’ll be very, very easy. It will really open the floodgates for anyone that knows Epic to really get their product on the market quickly and in front of Epic’s customers. So the distribution channel is huge,” Bakken said, according to the Journal.
Epic has been touting its application programming interfaces (APIs) to customers, app developers and company critics since at least 2013. “Your best path to selling to [our] large customer pool is to develop to standards and sell your solution to them, not to us,” Epic Vendor Relations Specialist Tim Thompson told an audience of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in June 2013.
Competitors, including McKesson, Cerner, Allscripts, athenahealth and Greenway Health, formed the CommonWell Health Alliance the same year to tout interoperability in what has been widely seen as a move against the perception that Epic closes off its data ecosystem.
Epic has no shortage of critics in Washington, some of whom want the FDA or some other federal agency to regulate EHRs as medical devices. Meanwhile, Epic and partner IBM are finalists for an $11 billion contract to replace the aging Military Health System EHR.
Neil Versel joined TriMed in 2015 as the digital editor of Clinical Innovation + Technology, after 11 years as a freelancer specializing in health IT, healthcare quality, hospital/physician practice management and healthcare finance.