Posted on 09/17/2022 10:57:37 PM PDT by ransomnote
One of the front-runners for a multibillion-dollar contract to redesign the Pentagon’s vast medical record system is Epic Systems, a privately held, fiercely independent firm that, in the view of many health IT experts, epitomizes the best and the worst of the effort to transform America’s health information systems/.MORE AT THE LINK
Competitors and some health care providers claim that Epic and its big-hospital customers pressure smaller practices to join Epic and the networks it serves by charging them large fees for sharing patient information if they don’t. But inside the Epic network, the information sharing is smooth compared with that of many makers of electronic health records.
If it wins the Defense contract, estimated at $11 billion and expected to be awarded in June, Epic will be poised to further extend its power in the industry. Already, the company holds the records of half the patients in the U.S., and the contract could enable Epic to set the terms for national issues such as the sharing of electronic health care records.
Epic’s privacy, exclusivity and the lavish annual conference and parties it hosts for doctors and IT specialists — flaunting its accumulation of federally subsidized wealth — breed resentment.
Why do I smell Chicoms, George Sore-Ass, or Bill GatesofHell behind this?
Today’s health care industry is just that, an industry.
Patient’s medical care is way down the list of its core values.
We opted out of Medicare, yet still are engulfed in its bureaucracy.
I went to war under LBJ. Worst President ever.
The design of the EPIC software is horrendous for doctors and patients and the overall practice of medicine.
EHRs don’t solve healthcare’s core crisis: staff shortages.
Epic is used in most hospitals
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Epic is better than the existing alternatives. It’s clearly not perfect, but across an array of specialists it allows for easy and critical access to information.
It’s customer interface is decent.
But of course…if your coding sucks The Who system falls apart. And input is often poor.
Well, I don’t blame you for that suspicion. Seems to me that there are a lot of medically related information sources that could be used for all sorts of extra-medical applications. You take or have taken SSRIs? Bam! we gonna take your guns. You didn’t get “the vaxx?” Bam! you lose your government owed benefits.
so, they buried the lead and didn’t tell us what EHR is
“Epic is better than the existing alternatives. It’s clearly not perfect, but across an array of specialists it allows for easy and critical access to information.
It’s customer interface is decent.
But of course…if your coding sucks The Who system falls apart. And input is often poor.”
Beg to differ. Going back to the 1980s, I’ve been using highly complex databases and have helped design some. I’ve shopped for and implemented large-scale, multi-location, complex vendor computer systems that serve many functions for staff and the public. and been an end user to many other such installations. Many here likely have.
Epic is perhaps the worst I’ve ever encountered in 50 years.
I know firsthand that the generalist doctors and the specialists hated it from the get go and never stop hating it. I know that the paraprofessionals who work with the doctors hate it.
Just yesterday I was on the phone with a random appointment scheduler who in helping with my request spontaneously railed at how much she hated the EPIC system. My previous GP hated i; he quit.
It’s display stinks. It’s architecture stinks. Apples and oranges mixed up; big and little mixed up. Important and trivial mixed up. Very difficult for the doctors and the patients. It’s search capability stinks. because it’s architecture stinks. Its silos stink. They are not logical. They are not hierarchical. Everything about it comes off as random. The display looks like someone was drunk putting it together. Its columns lack crucial choices. The very most crucial information for the patient is so well buried that patients might very well never find it, since they don’t know it’s there. Ditto for the doctors. Every ailment, teeny and major, regardless of when, where, how, why, is listed end to end in not discernible order. The most trivial and the most important snippets appear end to end with no coherent way to narrow a search. Hierarchies are absent. Getting from one place to another is not intuitive; Finding one’s past medical history is impossible. It’s a puzzle at every turn. A waste of patients’ time. A waste of medical staff time. The layout stinks. It was not put together with intelligence or a decent understanding of the needs of the end users.
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You say the competition is worse. I don’t know the competition, so can’t comment on that claim. What a terrible situation for the U.S. health care, if EPIC is really the best system in this day and age, it’s sad.
EPIC does not enhance patient care. It puts stumbling blocks and road blocks in the way for everyone involved. EPIC does not lay things out intuitively or logically. Medical care suffers as a result, especially in our awesome technological era, when business school graduates are running the show and pressing the medical staff to do more and more in less and less time. Something’s got to give and its patient care.
Just consider the sophistication and ease of use of the many other complex online database systems, commercial and non-profit, with which we interface online on a daily basis.
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