I’ve talked for years with people who want to solve the problem of connecting their non-EHR software to all the EHR vendors out there. Entrepreneur after entrepeneur has asked me how they can connect their product to ALL the EHR vendors. It usually ends up being a question like, “Isn’t there just one company we could connect to that will connect us to all the EHR vendors out there?”
I’ve dreamed about this as well. In fact, I recently wrote a post on Hospital EMR and EHR titled “Meaningful Use Drove the Data Gathering” where I suggest things like “EHR data is a treasure trove of opportunity.” and “In the future, EHR vendors will be differentiated more on the marketplace of third party applications they support than on their own in house developed apps.”
The problem is that even if every EHR vendor were to open up their application to third party applications, a startup company doesn’t want to have to integrate with all 300+ EHR vendors out there. Instead, they’d much rather integrate with one company who can connect them to all the other EHR vendors.
While a simple solution to connect to every EHR isn’t available yet, In a recent chat with Thanh Tran, Founder of Zoeticx, he showed me the closest thing to this vision that I’ve seen.
This slide shows what Zoeticx has built so far and a little bit of their vision for the future. When I saw this slide, it looked very much like what I described above.
As the slide shows, it only connects to 4 EHR vendors (5 EHR software) right now. So, they still have a lot of work to do to make this model work across all 300+ EHR vendors. However, it displays a vision of what’s possible if a company like Zoeticx builds the right middleware to connect EHR software to third party software.
After talking with Thanh Tran, you could tell that he lived, breathed, and loved the middleware space. He understood what it took to build a great middleware. For example, Zoeticx has a number of applications that leverage the middleware that they’re building. Some might argue that this makes Zoeticx a product company and not a middleware company. However, those that say this don’t understand what it takes to make great middleware.
By Zoeticx having some applications which leverage their middleware, they accomplish a couple very important things. First, they are essentially “eating their own dog food” and get to see first hand the challenges of building an application that uses their middleware. This will improve the middleware product better than any other technique. Second, Zoeticx applications will serve as essentially a set of demo applications which can be used to demonstrate what’s possible. Without these essentially demo applications, it’s often hard for people to understand how an API like Zoeticx can be used.
Certainly it’s possible …read more
