the case that the North Carolina company’s software should be listed on App Orchard, which led to PeraHealth becoming a member of the program, she says.
Another healthtech startup that has been working with Epic to make its products available through App Orchard is Healthfinch. The Madison, WI-based company develops software to automate routine tasks performed by physicians and others who care for patients in clinics.
Chris Tyne, senior vice president of special projects at Healthfinch, says there has been some recent speculation in the health IT industry about when Epic will open the hospital-facing “front end” of App Orchard, but that his company hasn’t received any information from Epic about a firm timeline for doing so.
Some of Epic’s competitors, including Watertown, MA-based Athenahealth (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ATHN]]), have their own catalogs of compatible third-party applications. Last year, one of Healthfinch’s products, Swoop, became available for download on the Athenahealth Marketplace.
Tyne also mentions that this year was the first that Epic invited Healthfinch to set up a booth at Epic’s yearly Users Group Meeting. The fact that the company has begun allowing third-party software vendors to attend the conference, which according to an Epic spokesperson is expected to bring more than 17,000 people to the company’s bucolic corporate campus, could be seen as an effort to push back against the view among some observers that Epic is a “closed platform.”
App Orchard also appears to be a step toward making connecting the technologies hospitals and clinics use—as well as ones they’re considering implementing—a more open and collaborative process.
