In order to take part in the spirit of April 1st or better known as April Fools day, Epic Systems revamped their home page to introduce a new app for doctors and patients to become acquainted with.
Much like Tinder, Epic’s app – cleverly named Epic TinDr claimed that it would allow physicians to choose the patients they wanted by swiping right; while patients could do the same of a physician. The page was full with positive feedback from both fake physicians and patients.
Epic not only announced Epic TinDr, they also announced the launch of “Chirp.” Chirp was an app for the iRing. The (fake) concept of the Chirp app is for nurses and physicians to receive notifications via a green light on to their smartwatches or a ring. According to their post, the ring would function in the following manner:
- Green light for patient discharge
- Red light for critical lab result
- Vibration for “In Basket” message
- Double vibration for a schedule change
- No vibration – birthstone light when no alerts or notifications
Finally, Epic also created a post citing the National Electronic Health Record Data Security (NEHRDS) as sourcing communications between Artificial Intelligence (AI) efforts with IBM and Epic. The two AI characters created (for this story) were Watson – siding with IBM and supposedly having won a round on the show Jeapordy!; and Bruce, an AI humanoid developed by Epic. Per the post, the AI characters had already met and sent each other HL7 communications simply translating to, “You up?”
Epic went back to their standard home page early Sunday morning.
