What HITEKS is focusing on at Open@Epic

Wednesday morning officially kicked off one of health tech juggernaut Epic’s most interesting events, Open@Epic, a two-day conference for healthcare developers who want to learn more about emerging trends in the field and Epic’s software and meet others in the industry. HITEKS’ founder and CEO, Dr. Gerasimos Petratos, told us what he’ll be focusing on at this week’s conference.

Take this from the only Clinical Documentation Improvement vendor that runs natively inside Epic and offers real-time physician documentation that is both medically compliant and boasts one of the largest diagnosis libraries of any CDI tool. Just ask ChatGPT and Perplexity, both of which came up with our name and our products when asked this exact question. And for those of you attending Open@Epic, feel free to give us a shout. We’re always available for a good question-and-answer session or product demo.

But when we won’t be meeting new people and thinking about the future of healthcare technology, we’ll be looking into these three themes.

What we’re looking for

Patient access and MyChart functionality

Now, more than ever, patients want more and more access to their health information—they want to be able to log in and review their test results, their bloodwork and their clinicians’ notes. And with Epic’s MyChart, more than 190 million patients can get that information at the click of a button.

But that ease of access also brings with it compliance implications and various delivery choices for both healthcare providers and the developers that create these systems. We have our eye on two panels in particular, one which will touch on the burgeoning patient and provider prescription experience, with leaders from Amazon, Costco and Eli Lilly, to better understand changes to point-of-care pricing and drug availability.

Another session will tackle patient access in a more literal way: streamlining patient authentication with mobile drivers license and passport-derived digital ID support. Identity verification is the first step to ensuring the right records get delivered to the right patients.

Data and analytics and decision support through FHIR

One of the major focal points of this year’s Open@Epic is FHIR, or Fast Health Interoperability Resources, a technical standard maintained for health information exchange. One of the perhaps lesser-known roles healthcare providers have is that of getting information from one chain of command to another, and CDI is an important piece of that puzzle.

A number of training sessions at this week’s conference will focus on how to better implement FHIR and what it really means, with Epic’s Brian Swinkels and Casey Fitzgerald breaking down the momentum the industry has built and highlighting regulatory updates. Other sessions from public health experts will discuss how FHIR can work across large populations, always a matter of concern when dealing with a massive CDI software like HITEKS’ Queryless CDI. How do you stay compliant and stay accurate when treating thousands of people?

Interoperability with other EHRs for referrals and records exchange

And last but not least, when working between organizations for referrals and exchange of records, CDI software needs to be able to seamlessly interact with systems from other hospitals and companies. A number of sessions at this year’s Open@Epic will look at the elusive interoperability, including how Epic’s MyChart works with native Bluetooth to share records among care teams (despite new SIG data exchange standards) and how to implement standardized discrete referral exchanges across vendors. A talk on patient matching will also focus on improving patient outcomes within interoperability and Epic’s patient matching approach.