Epic to Revamp Its App Market with Connection Hub

Epic, the electronic health records company, is revamping how its end users connect with third-party applications. In its Connection Hub slated to launch early next year, vendors with a connection to Epic can list their apps and self-report if they have achieved successful data exchange.

Site visitors, including Epic customers, can see vendor-provided information, such as app descriptions and website links. Connection Hub will be open to all vendors, with the goal of making it easy to join the online directory, the company states. Alongside Connection Hub, Epic will launch Vendor Services, which will provide developers access to Epic’s tutorials, newsletters, expanded testing sandboxes and technical support.

Epic’s existing App Market will shut down temporarily and relaunch later in the year. The launch of Connection Hub is designed to support open standards, Epic states, and to allow more applications to connect into its application programming interface.

The company’s redesigned app market will feature applications with an Epic seal of approval. It will feature about 800 apps, fewer than the 1,000 vendors that are presently listed in its App Market. The apps being removed from the App Market site will be listed in the Connection Hub directory, a company official recently told Modern Healthcare.

In effect, this will allow Epic to create two tiers of apps and to provide help to its customers in differentiating apps in an increasingly crowded marketplace.