Solo physicians and small practices will soon have a new low-cost electronic health records (EHR) solution option available to them from a brand they may know very well: Epocrates. The popular point-of-care mobile application provider will soon launch its own “mobile and Web-based” EHR (notice they put “mobile” first.)
“This was a logical next step for Epocrates,” Rose Crane, CEO of Epocrates stated in a press release. “Our understanding of how physicians work and what they need at the point of care is the foundation of our success. We owe it to our loyal physician subscribers to create an EHR solution that will work smoothly within their practices and allow them to continue caring for patients.”
Epocrates said its EHR offering is targeting the 50 percent of physicians in the US in small or solo practices. The EHR will include Epocrate’s drug and safety content, and, according to Epocrates it will be: “Easy to learn and use with minimal practice disruption; Accessible at the point of care and on demand for convenient patient data entry; Affordable via a web-hosted, customizable offering with low up-front investment that will meet “meaningful use” and HIPAA compliance requirements.”
This week, I fully expected to hear about mobile health companies’ plans to integrate with existing EHR vendors’ solutions — HIMSS is currently an EHR-centered show — but this announcement turns that logic on its head. Epocrates, with an install base of more than 900,000 total active users, including one in three U.S. physicians and 40 percent of medical students, may be one of the few mobile health companies that could pull this off.