Since SharePoint 2010’s launch, healthcare organizations from all over the country have expressed interest in all facets of its functionality. The EPC Group has been working not only with government healthcare institutes but also many prestigious hospital systems from all over the United States.
Electronic Medical Records are being pushed by the U.S. government as a way to get hospitals across the U.S. off paper charts, graphs and the 1990s way that paper-based documents were managed. I still shake my head that in 2010 my doctor still has to call his nurse in to pull up my chart, or have it sitting in the plastic holder outside the waiting room when they call me in.
Epic and Cerner, the two major players in the healthcare software arena, definitely don’t want a firm like mine to “crack the code” or develop the API to seamlessly bring in HIPAA-compliant data into SharePoint; trust me, we have been trying. Only the hospitals and government institutions that own versions of these tools will let us “dig in their sandbox” to develop Web services in APIs with either MOSS 2007 or SharePoint 2010 and the BCS (with custom code).
Why shouldn’t SharePoint 2010 take over Epic’s MyChart capabilities, and have the healthcare organization’s document management, intranet and Internet-facing managed with SharePoint’s seamless (easy to use and affordable) interface?
I think we are getting ready to see it happen, and I have been working with my firm and with other institutes to try to build these solutions, but I can assure you that CIOs of some of the biggest healthcare institutes in the world are very interested in this, and I am predicting this will happen in the next few years.
For more information on this topic (as it is a passion of mine), please feel free to e-mail me at errino@epcgroup.net as I am getting ready to release a white paper through this newsletter on this topic in the months to come.
Errin O’Connor is the Founder and CEO of EPC Group. He is currently in the process of writing “Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010—Inside Out” for Microsoft Press/O’Reilly Media.
