While I do not have direct knowledge of what happened at Texas Health Presbyterian, I do have direct knowledge of the Epic EMR software. I am not an Epic employee, but I do use Epic and configure it on a daily basis. It is my day job. I have it running right now on the same computer I'm writing this post on. My son (also not an Epic employee) has implemented their ASAP Emergency Department application in both adult and pediatric emergency departments in three hospitals. What I can say is this:
Epic is an extremely complicated, comprehensive, highly configurable, integrated system of computer applications. NO hospital installs Epic without doing massive configuration to customize it to run the way they want. Many of those customizations have to do with who sees what data entered by whom. It is far more likely that the problem at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital was due to the way they configured the system than to any inherent bug in Epic.
The fact that this has disappeared from the news is probably because Judy Faulkner, the owner/CEO/founder of Epic, probably called Texas Health Presbyterian and threatened to sue them for blaming their software. As soon as I saw that news article blaming Epic, I thought to myself "I'll bet Judy's gonna jump on that and squash it fast." And if it was due to Texas Health Presbyterian's configuration of Epic, and not to Epic itself, I don't blame her at all.
I’m sure you are correct. I work in Healthcare IT, and KNOW that a vendor has a basic product and it’s configured for a site. This was a failure on the user level.
Chances are, this was a dumb ass doctor(as most of them are) that dislikes computers, and doesn’t use the systems very well. They hardly ever read anything. I can tell you so many stories from our helpdesk guys and calls generated from stupid doctors. They also tend to be VERY belligerent and hateful. Since they believe they are “smart”, and the ultimate power in the universe, it HAS to be the “computer’s fault”, or “the system”.
Nurses aren’t a lot better, but they tend to be better users.
All I know, is after working in a hospital for about 10 years, I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to keep myself and my loved ones as healthy as possible, because you DO NOT want to put yourself in those people’s hands!(especially with the dark cloud of 0bamacare hanging over it all)
I got VERY sick last year, and I feel like I recovered just in time, for now anyway....