Allscripts, Cerner, Epic Signal More Open EHRs Ahead

Judy Faulkner, Zane Burke and Paul Black said during HIMSS17 interviews that they're offering APIs to foster innovation and tap into the industry's brightest minds to enable interoperability, patient identification, population health and more.

Top executives at three electronic health record companies — Allscripts, Cerner and Epic — revealed that they're working to make their EHRs more open. That means embracing APIs as a means to enable third-parties to write software and apps that run on their platforms.

"We need to continue to push the entire industry forward around interoperability and really open our platform to take advantage of all the bright minds in healthcare today," Cerner President Zane Burke said at HIMSS17. "We’re working with third parties today in the standards way and collaborating on multiple levels to really get the full value of all the investment in healthcare."

Allscripts CEO Paul Black said publishing APIs that third parties can use to create apps for its platform "is a big deal" and, in fact, the company has some 5,000 developers certified to do just that: Some 2 billion API data exchanges have been conducted on its platform since 2013...