Epic, Mychart and Apple

Apple-HealhKit-6

This year Apple announced the launch of Health, an app that leverages Healthkit SDK to connect partners to its health database on the iPhone. A day one partner for this launch was Epic. Now, understanding the difference between Epic EMR and Mychart is important as really Apple is connecting to the Mychart aspect of the Epic installation. This will provide consumers the ability to pull their information and potentially push basic demographic information. It is not believed that health data itself will flow bi-directionally as Mychart was not constructed to share user entered health data (clinical) with Epic. This would cause a lapse in clinical data integrity.

One question remains. Each Mychart app is connected to a specific health systems Epic install, so how will Apple health handle connecting to each institution, multiple institutions and reconcile data? We have yet to see the implementation but it should be interesting to see.

The other question is on device storage of PHI. Most health apps do not store health data on the device. However, this is not the case with Apple Health. The question will remain, how secure is an iPhone database and can PHI be hacked? Much scrutiny has been given to other health apps on even the smallest amount of resident data stored on the iPhone, what will happen when tons of PHI is on that phone? What happens if someone sells their iPhone on eBay and forgets to scrub it?

epic mychart apple healthkit

A Little About Epic

Epic is a privately held health care software company, whose systems are installed in large major hospitals, and hold the medical records of almost half the patients in the U.S.

It was founded in 1979 by Judith R. Faulkner. Originally headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin, Epic moved its headquarters to nearby Verona, Wisconsin in 2005.

Epic’s market focus is large health care organizations. Epic offers an integrated suite of health care software centered on a MUMPS database provided by InterSystems. Their applications support functions related to patient care, including registration and scheduling; clinical systems for doctors, nurses, emergency personnel, and other care providers; systems for lab technicians, pharmacists, and radiologists; and billing systems for insurers.

Doctors complain that Epic doesn’t communicate well with systems by other vendors, such as those used in smaller offices, and they will be forced to pay a 1% penalty for their Medicare payments if they can’t meet that standard. Epic says that they do at least as well as other systems, and the government should have established standards.

A RAND report described Epic as a "closed" platform that made it "challenging and costly for hospitals" to interconnect. Epic charges a fee to send data to some non-Epic systems. Faulkner said that Epic was one of the first to establish code and standards for secure interchange, which included user authentication provisions and a legally binding contract. She said the federal government, which gave $24 billion incentive payments to doctors for computerization, should have done that. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology said that it was a "top priority" and they just wrote a 10-year vision statement and agenda for it.

Find out more about EHR Reviews as you check http://www.nexthealthit.com/reviews/epic-ehremr-review-plus-mychart-mobile/