Michelle Malkin:
Ebola, Electronic Medical Records and Epic Systems
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3212648/posts
A Dallas hospital’s bizarre bungle of the first U.S. case of Ebola leaves me wondering: Is someone covering up for a crony billionaire Obama donor and her controversy-plagued, taxpayer-subsidized electronic medical records company? Last week, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital revealed in a statement that a procedural flaw in its online health records system led to potentially deadly miscommunication between nurses and doctors. [snip]
One of the reasons I really don't trust the MSM is because in my life I have had personal, direct knowledge of about 5 events that made national or international news, and what I witnessed, or otherwise had personal knowledge of, bore no resemblance to what was reported.
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.