Dive Brief:
- Epic plans to launch its new smaller EHR, Sonnet, this coming March, Becker’s Health IT & CIO Review reported.
- The company announced the new EHR in February along with the mid-size Utility — both scaled-down versions of its enterprise EHR, All Terrain.
- Both products are targeting smaller hospitals and physician groups. They will offer smaller applications and feature scopes, lower price points and shorter project timelines than All Terrain.
Dive Insight:
The Sonnet software is intended for smaller hospitals with ancillary services, post-acute care facilities, physician practices and critical access hospitals. Utility is poised for mid- to small-size organizations. Epic maintains they will hew close to the full-scale All-Terrain. “It’s still the same Epic … it’s fully integrated inpatient-outpatient, rev cycle, patient portal,” Adam Whitlatch, Epic’s research and development team lead, told Healthcare Dive in February.
In 2016, community hospitals with fewer than 200 beds were the biggest buyers of EHRs in the U.S. — accounting for nearly 80% of all sales, according to KLAS Research. The most popular product was Cerner CommunityWorks due to broad functionality and integration. Small standalone hospitals seeking a connection with nearby Epic hospitals selected Epic Community Connect.
Epic has made other moves to expand its footprint and EHR versatility. In September, the company launched a global interoperability platform called Share Everywhere. The technology allows patients to grant access to their personal information to any provider with internet access, regardless of whether they have EHRs.
Epic CEO Judy Faulkner said recently that she wants to shift the focus from EHRs to CHRs — comprehensive health records. The idea is to tap into the vast amounts of patient-generated and other data that helps build out social determinants of health and predict health outcomes.