Chrissy Farr at CNBC has reported that Slack may be posturing for a health care move. Recent changes in the site’s HIPAA compliance suggest that it may be readying to allow providers to share patient information in a clinical environment.

I’m thrilled. Why? Physicians have no means of communication. Sounds dramatic? Not really. Or, I should qualify that they have no 21st century means of communication. And the 1994-style messaging that we’ve all grown to tolerate from our EHRs doesn’t count.

What’s broken in health care that Slack will fix

Professional collaboration. There’s an idea. Communication between health care professionals is prehistoric, at best. Get me working on one page with my colleagues and watch what happens.

Slack will put email out of its misery. While email has been the killer app since the 1990’s, the sooner we give email a burial the faster we can get down to the work of working together. Slack will allow the necessary narrowmessaging (the right message to the right people) needed to counter the crisis of institutional noise.

Slack will bring comms, sociality and information into harmony. Communication, sociality and information are now happening on common channels. But backward thinking health IT professionals see these domains in separate silos. Slack has cracked the nut of pulling these together into an enterprise solution ripe for disrupting health care communication.

EHRs are not collaboration spaces. But they should be. Good health care is rooted in good communication. Expect the EHR to evolve as the next-gen care portal for providers. That includes the seamless capacity to connect and collaborate around patients. While Slack integration with Epic would be heavenly, the implementation gaps are not small.

At TMCx where I’m an advisor, Slack is our preferred platform for collaboration. Love it.

If you like this post you might get a kick out of my thinking around EHRs and health IT. Click through to the EHR Archives and poke around. I think you’ll like what you find.