The Epic EHR can trace its origins further into the past than most others, going back to 1979. It was founded with 1 ½ employees, in a basement, and over time turned into a major success story.

Based near Madison, Wisconsin in the US (self-guided tours are offered of the software factory), it claims that more than 280 million patients have their records currently in the Epic EHR. It also boasts that “Most Healthgrades Top 100 Hospitals Use Epic,” with a dominant market share, which is quite impressive given the increasing competition in this space. 

• You can learn more about Epic EHR here

Features

Being such an established, and large provider, the Epic EHR offers a comprehensive approach to software in this space, with support for the entire spectrum of both ambulatory, and hospital facility needs. There are modules offered for areas such as revenue cycle management, and analytics with AI to be more data driven. 

Both screens and workflows have the flexibility to be personalized, such as creating lists of favorite orders for commonly used items. The system incorporates predictive analytics with embedded decision support tools, such as when a clinician enters orders, the names of lab tests and medications will appear just by inputting the first few letters of the order.

Specialty modules are available to have laser focused workflows built in for multiple specialities. The choices are quite vast, and include modules for Cardiology, Ophthalmology, Orthopedics and Radiology among the dozens of possibilities.

Epic also offers advantages in revenue cycle as well. These include options for paperless billing, bill pay via online modules, the ability to offer payment plans via self-service, and reliable pre-estimates for upcoming medical care.

Patient Portal

Most EHR’s do include a Patient Portal to allow interaction with their providers, typically for prescription refill requests, patient questions, and online appointment scheduling. Epic offers all of this, but then takes it steps further with options for patients to attend e-visits online, and to answer online questionnaires. While most online portals are more useful in the ambulatory setting to take the load off the front office staff, the Epic MyChart Patient Portal has next generation inpatient functions such as maintaining contact with their care providers, access to personalized online education for their disease process, and to be able to see their provider notes and lab results while hospitalized.

Mobile

Epic also has tools for clinicians, with an emphasis on streamlining things to get common tasks done efficiently, such as the available mobile apps. The mobile app is called Haiku, and now is available for both iOS and Android. Haiku is quite useful for a busy clinician to keep track of lab results on the move, and even put in orders. However, keep in mind that the iOS app is better developed, with Android getting a low rating of 1.7 out of 5 stars.

Drawbacks

The Epic EHR is certainly a veteran of this space, and the benefit is the mature EHR platform that it provides with stability and usability, such as prebuilt order sets for complex care needs, such as ordering anticoagulation with integrated monitoring labs. That’s not to say that it is perfect for all situations.

By way of example, there are frequent updates to the platform, and they happen at the backend, a benefit of a SaaS, as the company does this without direct user involvement. This generally happens on a monthly basis, on a Saturday night around midnight, and goes on for a few hours. While this timing is not likely to disrupt an ambulatory practice, in a hospital this creates downtime, and while existing notes and test results are available for review, all new content has to be created offline via paper charting, and then back entered into the system when full Epic goes back online.

Another issue is that new updates do not always provide a clear benefit. There are times when the system wants permission to reorganize or simplify the icons to redo the layout, but this can be confusing to a busy clinician that already knows where everything is, and now has to search for the functions that they previously had. The repeated requests to try out the new function can get annoying to clinicians as well who simply want to proceed with work. 

Epic could be more straightforward and seamless as well. There are often multiple ways of accomplishing the same task, which can be confusing to novice users as everyone is doing things a little differently. There are redundant flowsheets making it a challenge to view the correct one, that often provide too much or too little information, such as charts for vital signs that include a temperature, or another chart that is just for temperature only. Viewing all this information ends up with lots of clicking around to gather it all to create a single note, as it is a somewhat nonlinear progression as the note keeps getting closed out as results or orders get displayed. 

Support

Epic EHR is run as a SaaS, which explains why it is completely browser based, with no software to install for any platform, and therefore works with any OS with a browser, including Windows, and Mac. There is now mobile support for both iOS and Android. Rather than just a single iOS app, there are even dedicated apps for the iPhone (Haiku), iPad (Canto), and even the Apple Watch (Limerick).

Ongoing support is generally offered online, although for a larger account an in person team can come to follow-up, and provide additional optimization support.

Pricing

No pricing for the Epic EHR is available anywhere on their website, what is unfortunately pretty standard for this type of software to be opaque on pricing. It is however available via a custom quote, which of course requires company contact to select options for a number of users and determine a price. 

Figuring into the cost of Epic include variables including the hosting expense, whether self hosted, cloud based or both, and the training- which is often packaged into the deal, and can run a la carte up to $2,000 (£1559). Another variable is whether the software is purchased outright which can run approximately $1,200 (£936) for a smaller deployment to $500,000 (£389,802) for a larger facility, or whether acquired via the monthly subscription route, which offers the appeal of lower upfront costs, but is likely to keep increasing over time. 

Final verdict

The Epic EHR is veteran software that provides a market leading solution for this challenging area. The positives include the support for multiple medical specialties via modules, flexibility in workflows, and options for cloud and self-hosted deployments. The negatives are there as well, with things like the higher cost, the low rated Android app, and monthly downtime as important factors to be aware of before blindly signing up. Still, the Epic EHR does provide a comprehensive software solution that provides the flexibility to cover the gamut from a solo practice to a multi-facility health system with everything in between, with many more features than their competitors. In fact, we look forward to seeing what this company will do next in this space. 

• We've also highlighted the best Electronic Health Record software

Nimble is a communication-focused CRM tool that makes it easy to keep in touch with your leads and clients. The platform includes some powerful tools to generate new leads, as well as provides a user-friendly way to manage messages, segment clients, and stay on top of social media. For everything that Nimble has to offer, this CRM software is surprisingly cheap, too.

Plans and Pricing

Nimble makes pricing simple, with a single plan that’s available for $19 per user per month if you pay annually or $25 per user per month if you pay month-to-month. You get all of Nimble’s features, plus up to 25,000 contacts, 1,000 custom fields, and 2 GB of storage space per user. Upgrades are available if you need more contacts or storage.

You can try out Nimble free for 14 days to see if the platform works for your business.

Features

Nimble has a ton of features for lead prospecting, client communication, and social media management:

Lead Prospecting

The platform offers a truly impressive number of different methods to bring contacts into your CRM database.

If you’re prospecting for new leads, you can use Nimble’s email signature parsing feature to automatically capture contact data from email footers. Salespeople in the field can also use Nimble’s mobile app to take a picture of a business card. Nimble will automatically parse the data to create a new contact for you.

Or, try the Smart Contacts app. This browser plugin allows you to click on a person’s or company’s name, and it will automatically pull up whatever social media and contact information it can find for you. Better yet, you can save that data to a new contact right from your browser.

Last, but certainly not least, there’s Nimble’s ‘prospector’ tool. If you visit a company’s website, this tool will automatically extract all of the contacts it can find - including from pages that can’t be found using the site’s public navigation. Just beware that you only get 10 uses of the prospector tool per month included with your plan.

Once you have contacts in your database, you can segment them however you like. This is where Nimble’s custom fields come into play. Simply create tags and then drag and drop them onto your contacts to create flexible lists.

Communication Management

Another nice feature in Nimble is the unified inbox. You can get messages from your email, Twitter account, Microsoft Teams, and other platforms all in one place. Unfortunately, you won’t find Facebook messages here since Facebook discontinued support for most CRM platforms in 2015.

All of your communications with a client or lead are archived to that contact, so you can always go back and see what was said. This record can be shared with your team - or not if you want privacy. Plus, if you have social media details saved for a contact, Nimble will automatically display their latest posts so you can see what they’ve been up to since your last message.

Interface and In Use

Nimble’s interface is very easy to use, which is something of an accomplishment given how many tools this platform offers. The most notable feature is the dashboard, which gives you a clear overview of everything you need to know about when you first get to work in the morning. Your dashboard shows deals in progress and any status updates, upcoming events, new messages, and social media updates from your contacts. You can customize all of the information displayed, including marking contacts as ‘important’ to prioritize their updates and messages.

The rest of Nimble’s tools are segmented into six different tabs, which makes it straightforward to find what you need. Better yet, the platform doesn’t require much setup out of the box, so by the end of the 14-day free trial you should have a pretty good sense of what Nimble can do for you.

Nimble does have a mobile app for iOS and Android, which is a big plus if you have salespeople in the field. It’s essentially a mobile version of the web client—the only notable tool added is the ability to scan in business cards. It would be nice if Nimble’s mobile app made tools for social media management easier to access, since this is a common on-the-go need. But, this is a pretty minor inconvenience.

Support

Nimble’s support is something of a letdown. You can only get customer service via live chat or email, and responses can sometimes take until the next business day. On top of that, while the Nimble team holds weekly webinars, there’s surprisingly little documentation about the platform’s features.

The Competition

Nimble has carved out a niche for itself as a low-priced lead generation and client communication platform. But, if you need more project management and reporting capabilities, consider Zoho CRM or Salesforce. Both of these platforms offer many of the same communication tools as Nimble, but add more team collaboration, task tracking, and project mapping features.

Final Verdict

Nimble is a very capable CRM software for companies looking to generate new leads and keep in touch with clients. The platform sports an easy-to-use interface with plenty of integrations and some very advanced lead-scraping tools. While Nimble isn’t a full-blown project management platform, it’s a great choice for small businesses that want to maximize the value of their communications.

• You can sign up to Nimble here