I work for a non-profit retail pharmacy and Diabetes Education center where our certified diabetes educator sees patients for MTM and insulin pump trainings.
We are looking for new pharmacy software and were interested in Epic Willow because it interfaces with one of the main hospital’s EHR in our city. However, I’m wondering if we can purchase and use Epic Willow independently and if it interfaces with EHRs outside that don’t use EPIC (for example: the other big medical group in our city doesn’t use epic but we get referrals from/to them frequently).
Hi Molly,
Unfortunately an organization cannot purchase just one module i.e. Epic Willow module independently without the entire hospital organization switching over.
Regarding interfacing Epic with non-Epic EHR systems, I know that Epic has a sort of “bridge” application called Community Connect or something like that (the name of the application might vary form organization to organization). They usually use it for non-related organizations that all use Epic so they can share medical record info. I know it can also be used to some extent for smaller rural hospitals that can’t afford the full Epic build-out and it’s a way to give them a sort of “Epic lite” if you will, so that they can communicate/share medical record info with larger partner organizations.
Now for what you want to do i.e. get Epic and try to connect it with non-Epic systems, I have never heard of that being done and have not seen it done in all my time of working with Epic organizations.
I’m curious to hear about what solution you finally find. please do keep me posted.