Epic launches new 'Showroom' website for 3rd-party apps, services

Epic launches new 'Showroom' website for 3rd-party apps, services unknown Epic launches new 'Showroom' website for 3rd-party apps, services  FierceHealthcare

As part of an initiative teased last summer, Epic officially launched this week new third-party vendor programs to connect health tech companies with health systems and providers.

The new third-party vendor programs, as part of a new website called Showroom, essentially replace the app market Epic shut down late last year.

"The overall goal of Showroom is to have a single place where people can go to learn about both the products and services that work with Epic," Seth Howard, senior vice president of R&D at Epic, said in an interview.

Epic announced in December 2022 that it planned to overhaul its app market to keep up with the rapid growth of third-party vendors.

"As the industry changes and more software healthcare vendors want to work with us, we've needed to define programs to accommodate this guided by what meets your needs," Epic CEO Judy Faulkner told an audience of health IT executives during the company's annual user group conference in Verona, Wisconsin back in August.

Howard said the launch of Showroom and how third-party vendors are organized and categorized is part of an "evolution" of how Epic wants to work with vendors and how it connects software companies with its provider customers.

"We introduced App Orchard and that transitioned into App Market. Showroom, we see as, in some ways, an evolutionary step, and in some ways, it's a broader tool for people to use in the sense that it goes beyond just apps and products," Howard said.

Within the Showroom site, the Supply Shop service features Epic support resources and staffing to help implement new features. Through that feature, providers can get fractional help for short-term assistance and full-time staff augmentation for IT teams to work on larger projects. The Emeritus program can help organizations fill interim leadership roles by connecting with retired healthcare executives, Howard said.

The Health Grid feature enables providers to connect with the broader healthcare ecosystem including payers, specialty diagnostic labs and national telehealth networks.

"Providers can work with health plans to share data, reduce administrative burden and get access to care more quickly for patients. With specialty diagnostic labs, the goal is to make providing access to genetic tests, and specialty diagnostic tests, easy for providers to order in Epic. The results of those tests come back discretely and natively into Epic workflows to provide benefit to precision medicine programs," Howard said.

The "Products" page as part of the Showroom represents an overhaul of Epic's former App Market.

Epic launched the App Orchard store in January 2016 to enable third-party vendors to connect with Epic customers like hospitals and health systems. A revamp of the app orchard is now necessary as more applications have connected to its API, executives late last year.

In its place, Epic launched in December 2022 the Connection Hub, an online directory for vendors to share their ability to interoperate with Epic software. 

"Connection Hub is a place where any vendor who has a live connection with Epic can list their product. That's intended to be a broader listing of anyone that uses available technology to integrate into workflows and to provide information to our customers on how they integrate with Epic," Howard said.

Vendors pay an annual $500 fee to join the Connection Hub, which is now part of the Products section.

A second category within Products, called Toolbox, highlights software categories with recommended practices for integration and the third-party apps that follow those recommendations, representing a subset of the vendors in the Connection Hub, according to Howard. Current categories include payment device integration and oncology clinical pathways decision support.

A third category, called Workshop, features third-party vendors who are co-developing technology with Epic. Workshop replaces the "Partners" and "Pals" programs that Epic executives announced at the user conference in August.

"Workshop, we felt, more closely matched the spirit of what 'Partners' and 'Pals' was meant to be, which is a relationship where we're developing new technologies that go beyond standards, rather than a stamp of approval. It's not intended as a stamp of approval," Howard said.

Companies featured in the Workshop category include clinical documentation companies Nuance and Abridge, survey software company Press Ganey and digital contact center company Talkdesk.

"Workshop is the place to highlight areas where we are working directly with vendors to develop new technology to support additional innovations. For example, ambient voice and patient satisfaction are two areas where we have started development projects jointly with other vendors," Howard said.

He added, "We are big believers in standards-based interoperability and using well-established standards. But, at the same time, our providers gave us feedback that they wanted things that go beyond those standards and wanted to explore ways of integrating more natively into the workflow. It would have been very difficult to try to move fast on that and work with two dozen vendors all simultaneously. We established, as part of the Workshop, which categories are important to focus on. Within those categories, we establish a set of criteria to make sure that we are working with the right groups first to develop those new technologies and that criteria is largely based on feedback from our provider community."

Epic's approach is to identify categories of digital health technologies that are of most interest to health system customers, Faulkner told the audience at the user group conference back in August.

Epic's new programs are designed to keep up with the rapid growth of third-party vendors.

"Last year alone, there were over 13,000 requests from various vendors to have a special relationship or a special type of integration with Epic and 13,000 is not a sustainable model to do something unique for each one," Howard said. "We needed to create a program and have a way that those groups can work with our customers."

Epic's 'Showroom' hub also will include its Open.Epic application programming interface tool for developers and vendor services, which offers additional testing tools. For app developers, Open.Epic provides access to what the company calls the largest collection of industry-standard APIs and tools to test and launch apps.

"It's free for anyone to use as a reference to develop applications. It's easy to access with a simple click-through agreement. While 'Showroom' is a mechanism to help provide information about which vendors integrate into Epic using those technologies, Open.Epic is the place for vendors to go to gain access to information about those standards that we follow," Howard said. "We expect that most people who want to build apps will be able to use that as a starting point to build things. We see standards as a sustainable and scalable model, rather than building one-off solutions for each one."

Abridge CEO Shiv Rao said Epic's approach with Showroom makes it easier for tech companies, startups and health systems to understand how Epic interacts with third-party vendors. 

"They are creating a pathway for every type of technology to integrate into Epic," he said in an interview. He noted that the Workshop program, which Abridge participates in, highlights companies offering a differentiated user experience as those vendors and Epic "push boundaries together" to develop new tech.