Epic founder and CEO Judy Faulkner said her company helped pave the way for interoperability in healthcare by getting health systems to buy into data exchange.
Ms. Faulkner said in an Aug. 5 blog post that she was inspired to pursue interoperability many years ago after learning that one of her husband's pediatric patients' lives may have been saved if her medical records were available in the state where she received emergency treatment.
The EHR vendor developed its Care Everywhere interoperability platform for Epic users, but health systems were initially reluctant because of liability and data quality concerns, Ms. Faulkner wrote. She discovered that one of the first health systems to adopt the program — Fountain Valley, Calif.-based MemorialCare — did so after its CIO asked his CEO to sign off on some software he wanted.
"The CEO did not ask what the software did," Ms. Faulkner wrote. "He explained to the group of CEOs [at an Epic meeting] that if he had known what it was for, he would not have signed it! Lucky break, finally, for Interoperability! Congratulations to the CIO and CEO who provided that break, Scott Joslyn and Barry Arbuckle!"
Epic helped launch Carequality, a national interoperability framework for care coordination, and was the first EHR vendor to enroll in information-sharing group TEFCA, according to Ms. Faulkner.
"It was years before most of the other major vendors developed the ability to interoperate, and fortunately Meaningful Use requirements helped move that along," she wrote. "Epic's goal had always been that regardless of vendor, every patient's data should be able to be shared, with the patient's permission, wherever the patient went."