A Look At Share Everywhere, Epic’s Patient Data Sharing Tool

Lately, it looks like Epic has begun to try and demonstrate that it’s not selling a walled garden. Honestly, I doubt it will manage to convince me, but I’m trying to keep an open mind on the matter. I do have to admit that it’s made some steps forward.

One example of this trend is the launch of App Orchard, a program allowing medical practices and hospitals to build customized apps on its platform. App Orchard also supports independent mobile app developers that target providers and patients.

Marking a break from Epic’s past practices, the new program lets developers use a FHIR-based API to access and Epic development sandbox. (Previously, Epic wouldn’t give mobile app developers permission to connect to its EMR unless a customer requested permission on its behalf.) We’ll have to keep an eye on the contracts they require developers to sign to see if they’re really opening up Epic or not.

But enough about App Orchard. The latest news from Epic is its launch of Share Everywhere, a new tool which will give patients the ability to grant access to their health data to any provider with Internet access. The provider in question doesn’t even have to have an EHR in place. Share Everywhere will be distributed to Epic customers at no cost in the November update of its MyChart portal.

Share Everywhere builds on its Care Everywhere tool, which gives providers the ability to share data with other healthcare organizations. Epic, which launched Care Everywhere ten years ago, says 100% of its health system customers can exchange health data using the C-CDA format.

To use Share Everywhere, patients must log into MyChart and generate a one-time access code. Patients then give the code to any provider with whom they wish to share information, according to a report in Medscape. Once they receive the code, the clinician visits the Share Everywhere website, then uses the code once they verify it against the patient’s date of birth.

As usual, the biggest flaw in all this is that Epic’s still at the center of everything. While patients whose providers use Epic gain options, patients whose health information resides in a non-Epic system gain nothing.

Also, while it’s good that Epic is empowering patients, Direct record sharing seems to offer more. After all, patients using Direct don’t have to use a portal, need not have any particular vendor in the mix, and can attach a wide range of file formats to Direct messages, including PDFs, Word documents and C-CDA files. (This may be why CHIME has partnered with DirectTrust to launch its broad-based HIE.)

Participating does require a modest amount of work — patients have to get a Direct Address from one of its partners — and their provider has to be connected to the DirectTrust network. But given the size of its network, Direct record sharing compares favorably with Share Everywhere, without involving a specific vendor.

Despite my skepticism, I did find Share Everywhere’s patient consent mechanism interesting. Without a doubt, seeing to it that patients have consented to a specific use or transmission of their health data is a valuable service. Someday, blockchain may make this approach obsolete, but for now, it’s something.

Nonetheless, overall I see Share Everywhere as evolutionary, not revolutionary. If this is the best Epic can do when it comes to patient data exchange, I’m not too impressed.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

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