They should be also looking for usability help, not outside engineering-centric developers!

EHR vendors: Contact Us!

Electronic health record (EHR) companies are beginning to partner with outside software developers to help them ramp up new applications for care management, population health management and patient engagement. Athenahealth, Allscripts, and eClinicalWorks (eCW) all are placing big bets on this approach, although eCW is tilting more toward mobile health apps than the other two vendors are.

This week, Athenahealth announced a new partnership with Mashery, a provider of application programming interface (API) management technology and services, to APIs to the health IT developer community. The aim is to develop "best-of-breed, HIPAA-compliant health care applications that can be easily introduced and integrated within health care provider workflows," according to the news release.

The attraction for developers: a potential market of 40,000 providers that use Athenahealth's cloud-based EHR. "We're providing the data and knowledge from our cloud-based network, a captive audience for developers to innovate for, and an online sandbox to do it all in," said Kyle Armbrester, director of business development for Athenahealth, in a statement.

See the full article on Information week @ http://is.gd/1Y3sPw