Epocrates EHR Raises New Possibilities and Ethical Questions

This article was originally published by iMedicalApps.

Last week, Epocrates announced the availability of its long-anticipated EHR platform cleverly named Epocrates EHR. Targeted to small and solo physician practices, the service is a web-based software-as-a-service platform which will be offered on a monthly-subscription basis. At launch, it includes a native iPhone app that appears to include access to patient records as well as e-prescribing functionality, with iPad support reportedly in the works. Epocrates EHR will also include support for billing/coding, data analysis and reporting, and an interesting task-management feature. Missing at launch is the SpeechAnywhere feature, which integrates Nuance’s cloud-based medical speech-recognition technology to allow for rapid mobile dictation. We commented earlier in the year how the speech to text feature would be a game changer and are disappointed it’s not going to be integrated at launch.

There are several factors that make this offering particularly unique and raise some interesting questions. First, given the wide-spread brand recognition, Epocrates is likely to be successful in signing up customers in its target audience. Since all data is stored remotely by Epocrates, they will be in a position to gather information on populations that would otherwise be left out of large prospective and retrospective studies typically run out of large academic centers.

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