Epic CEO Judy Faulkner said this past week that the electronic health record giant plans to create a new hub for innovators.

Speaking with Forbes Media editor in chief Steve Forbes on the Forbes' "What's Ahead" podcast, Faulkner said the platform will be a space for Epic customers to share information about patient care with others, regardless of whether or not they are Epic users.  

EpicShare.org should be "out in about a month," said Faulkner, and will offer the ability to "share that information so that others – doesn't matter if they’re Epic users or other’s users – can learn: What are these folks doing that is really helping, for example, reduce catheterization infection, or [help] with sleep apnea, or whatever it is. What are they doing that can be shared?"  

Faulkner said that in addition to chief innovation officers, health systems and organizations should have "chief imitation officers," "to watch what others are doing and share."  

"We have so many wonderful stories from our customers. We will get maybe five to ten a week of creative things they’re doing that really need to be shared," she said.

Epic did not respond to requests for comment for more information about EpicShare.org.  

WHY IT MATTERS  

In addition to sharing stories around patient success, Faulkner stressed the importance of data interoperability, saying it could help strengthen evidence-based care.

Pointing to the company's Cosmos database, Faulkner said she anticipates that all Epic customers will eventually share de-identified medical data sets.  

Cosmos is "a huge and wonderful research repository," Faulkner said. "Most people want to make evidence-based decisions. So what Cosmos will do for the clinician is to let the clinician know what worked best for a patient that the clinician is seeing by looking at other patients like that patient, and evaluating the different treatment that they got, and coming up with the best."  

"Eventually, when Cosmos results are well trusted, [they] will guide the physician to the decision that Cosmos has examined … always allowing the clinician, of course, to override it," Faulkner said.  

"The only way you can get Cosmos to alert you as to what to do is if you share your data with it," she continued. "So the two go together."  

THE LARGER TREND  

Faulkner previously spoke about the Cosmos database at the HLTH VRTL 2020 conference this year, when she told Intergroup Understanding chair George Halvorson that it will help clinicians make decisions based on observational data.

"Everyone wants to make a decision based on the evidence. They don't want it just to be anecdotal," she said. "So this will help clinicians make decisions on observational evidence-based medicine."

"Now that there's a learning curve going on, yeah, really good to share the learning curve and to get the information to and then to get it out in ways that are useful to the caregivers," said Faulkner.  

Epic also took steps toward information sharing via the Epic Health Research Network, which launched this May. The platform's goal, according to the company, is "facilitating rapid sharing of new medical knowledge."

"Studying the data from our customers' patients allows us to have access to somewhere between 100 million and 200 million patients right now," Faulkner told Halvorson. "Eventually, it will be more than 200 million in the whole database if everyone contributes. EHRN is looking at that data and trying to find out, especially with COVID-19 right now, what is there that we should share."  

ON THE RECORD  

"One of the things our customer executives tell us all the time is that they want to stand on each other's shoulders," Faulkner told Forbes about EpicShare.org. "They want to know what others are doing, so they can do it too. So we call that 'imitate to innovate.'"

Kat Jercich is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Twitter: @kjercich
Email: kjercich@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.