EHR Vendor Epic Unveils Website for Health IT Best Practices, Education

EHR vendor Epic Systems has launched a new website to support healthcare stakeholder understanding of its health IT, according to reporting from the Wisconsin State Journal.

EpicShare.org. also aims to provide healthcare stakeholders and the public a place to exchange ideas and best practices for the use of health IT.

The website has gained thousands of subscribers in its first few weeks post-go-live, Leela Vaughn, Epic senior executive, told the news outlet.

“We’ve been working on EpicShare for just about a year, and this is one of the things that came out of the early days of the pandemic,” said Vaughn.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the new domain is the “Hey Judy” section, where traditionally reclusive Epic founder and CEO Judy Faulkner shares thoughts on her business philosophy.

In the first entry, “’Yes If,’ Not ‘No Because,’” Faulkner reflected on how she uses intentional language during meetings to help support solution-oriented thinking.

“When I’m in a meeting and hear a lot of ‘No, because …’ I frequently say, ‘Please turn that into a ‘yes, if …’,” she wrote. “It totally changes the thinking and the discussion, and then we often end up doing much better things.”

The website has four additional sections: “Perspectives,” “News Watch,” “Share & Learn,” and “Tips & Tricks.”  

In the “Perspectives” section, healthcare executives share industry insights. The first article written by a health system executive highlighted how health IT can serve as a framework for organizational change.

Under the “News Watch” tab, there are published articles regarding the use EHR software and data to support healthcare delivery. For instance, a post titled “Predicting COVID-19 Hotspots: Kaiser Permanente Tool Uses EHR Data to Forecast Surges” discusses how Epic data has the potential to predict COVID-19’s impact on hospitals.

The “Share & Learn” section gives healthcare stakeholders a place to submit stories about how health IT has improved outcomes at their organizations.

Under the “Tips & Tricks” tab, there are Q&As related to topics such as clinician burnout, physician satisfaction, and EHR use cases.

Vaugh told the Wisconsin State Journal that while the website is mainly geared toward healthcare stakeholders, patients can also leverage EpicShare as a research tool.

“Anybody can be reading these and showing them to their doctor,” Vaughn said. “One thing we really worked hard on was getting rid of the jargon so [EpicShare] is [digestible] to people who aren’t super tech savvy.”

The EHR vendor also created a Twitter account for Epicshare.org, a first for Epic.

“As we grow as a company, social media is another piece of that,” public relations director Barb Hernandez, told the news outlet. “We noticed customers use Twitter quite a lot.”

EpicShare is the company’s second push towards an expanded online presence. In early 2020, the company launched EHRN.org, a research network for healthcare professionals.