Lab Soft News: Epic Moving into the Meditech-Dominated, Smaller Hospital EMR Market

Epic Systems continue to grow (see: Epic Systems Planning to Add 900 New Jobs) and looking for new business, having grabbed most of the contracts in the 500+ bed hospital business (see: Does Epic Exercise a Near-Monoply for EMRs in Larger U.S. Hospitals?). In a previous note, I suggested that Cerner was perhaps feeling the Epic heat and trying to expand into the smaller hospital business, going head-to-head with Meditech (see: Is Cerner Modifying Its EMR Business Model?; A Closer Look at Meditech's "Sweet Spot" in the Hospital Software Market). Perhaps in response, Epic now may be eyeing this mid- to small-tier hospital market according to Mr. HIStalk (see: Monday Morning Update 11/14/11):

“Re: Cheyenne Regional Medical Center. Going Epic.” The 218-bed hospital gets board approval to replace McKesson Horizon with Epic in a $19 million deal, saying it will cost about $5 million over five years to implement Epic. It says Meaningful Use money will offset that amount, and after that, Epic will actually be cheaper that McKesson. Epic doesn’t usually sell to hospitals that small, so either CRMC is affiliated with a larger Epic customer or Epic is started to push down into Meditech territory.

Recall that Epic is already making inroads into the smaller hospital market with its remote hosting model via its large, neighboring hospital clients (see: Epic Helps Convert Its Large Hospital Customers into Epic Hosting Sites/Consultants). What can I say other than Judith Faulkner, CEO and founder of Epic, continues to be ambitious and is growing her company into the industry giant. This excerpt from an article may provide further evidence of this fact (see: Epic Wants To Build Large Auditorium In Verona):

Health care software giant Epic Systems Corp. is proposing building a large auditorium on its Verona campus for its annual user group meeting....The company is proposing a 13,000-seat auditorium on [the] campus. Capacity wise, it would be the third largest in Dane County -- behind Camp Randall Stadium and the Kohl Center. Verona City Administrator Bill Burns said preliminary plans were unveiled and discussed at Monday night's planning commission meeting. "It certainly is a large building -- a large venue," Burns said. "As Epic discussed at the presentation, the reason that they're doing this is a very important part of their business -- their annual user group meeting -- and being able to get all their clients together in one place and do a lot of collaboration and learning from each other."

For the non-football fan readers of this blog, Camp Randall Stadium is where the University of Wisconsin plays its football games. Here's Mr. HIStalk's latest opinion about Epic's future and that of its rivals in the EMR market (see: Monday Morning Update 11/21/11):

Since both Epic and its competitors just keeping doing what they’ve always done, you might suspect the leading team will keep piling on points in this embarrassingly lopsided victory. Time and customer money is running out to mount significant competition, so the only Plan B is to hunker down, try to keep existing customers happy since new ones will be hard to come by, and hope Epic’s dominance causes it to stumble to the point that customers will walk away from their huge investment and go shopping yet again for systems they didn’t want the first time around. That or just cede the core inpatient systems market to Epic and find less-competitive territory, which some pretty cool small companies are already doing.

:: Update on 11/21/2011 at 11:13 a.m. (see: Foster more Epics across region)

The company has 5,200 employees -- up from 4.300 in May -- with no end to the hiring in sight. Company officials expect the workforce to grow to about 6,000 by the end of 2012.