DrChrono, a company enabling the medical practice of the future, today announced a new partnership with Stitch, a company that has created a free HIPAA-compliant app for healthcare teams to send internal messages, communicate with patients and track daily tasks. Both DrChrono and Stitch are Y Combinator portfolio companies.
In the past, physicians and medical staff would need to communicate with each other about patients using email, text and phone calls or other outdated chat software that resides outside of the EHR; many of these tools to communicate are not HIPAA-compliant.
Now, with the integration with DrChrono’s EHR, a practice can get real-time notifications about patients, such as new medications added or change in patient history from the EHR and post it in their Stitch application in the form of a message and bring that right into the practice’s chat room. The app is purposefully built for healthcare teams and brings all of the benefits of a modern collaboration and communication tool like Slack or Skype for Business, but is also HIPAA-compliant right out of the box.
“EHRs are not designed to do real-time communication, so until now, things like group chat within a practice had to be done outside of an EHR which is cumbersome and can lead to errors,” said Jonathan Weinstein, Co-Founder and COO of Stitch. “Additionally, HIPAA mandates are driving practices to find communication platforms that are designed for healthcare practices and protect patient information. Now with Stitch’s integration with DrChrono, practices can get real-time notifications on patient updates and communicate on a HIPAA- compliant platform, all within the EHR. This is a major step forward for practices when it comes to patient collaboration.”