Mr. HIStalk has responded to a reader's comment about Epic relating to the recent NYT article covering the company (see: News 1/20/12). Here's a link to my recent note on this same article (see: More on Epic's (Non)-Interoperability and the Recent NYT Puff Piece) and a link to the original NYT article (see: Digitizing Health Records, Before It Was Cool). Below is the Q and A exchange and response in HIStalk:
Reader Comment: From Otoscope: “Re: Epic. I hear that Epic is competing for a deal in NYC. I wonder if the puff piece in the Times about how cool their campus is and Judy Faulkner giving them a rare interview isn’t an Epic marketing push to win over some decision-makers struggling to find a reason to pay Epic’s exorbitant asking price? Maybe there’s a pattern of newspaper exposure where Epic had other high-profile deals on the table.”
Mr. HIStalk response: The article also claims that Epic steals the best programmers who would otherwise be working for Google or Facebook, which seems a bit of a stretch given Epic’s reputation for hiring new grads with no experience. I doubt many world-class programmers are torn between working with cutting edge technology for Facebook in the Silicon Valley vs. moving to chilly Wisconsin to write MUMPS just because Epic’s campus is cool (not that there’s anything wrong with that, especially if they’re doing it for the satisfaction of helping patients.) The article was a bit fawning, but it was a business feature, not a hard-hitting expose’.
I was not looking for a hard-hitting expose from the NYT on Epic. However, I did expect, perhaps, a little more balance when a prestigious newspaper covers a company that many would say is the most talked about EMR company in the country. After all, the federal government has established programs to feed billions of dollars to hospitals that digitize their records and a good portion of it is going to Epic. Let me quote from this same article on the influence of the company:
Epic has been adding other large customers, for a total of 260, including 35 new contracts last year. All told, it says, its systems will cover 127 million patients with active electronic health records by July 2013. It now has 5,100 employees; to handle all that growth, it plans to hire 1,000 more people this year. Its customers include many hospitals that are connected to medical schools, as well as large physician groups. The Epic software system is a “de facto standard among the more complex academic health centers and multispecialty medical groups,” says Dr. John D. Halamka, chief information officer of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and a professor at the Harvard Medical School.
If you were a journalist writing this article for the NYT and the company's software was referred to as the "de facto standard among the more complex academic health centers", would it not occur to you to quote some experts in the field with a less rosy view about the Epic business model, interoperability of Epic systems with other EMRs, and some of the controversy enveloping CEO Judith Faulkner (see: More on Epic's (Non)-Interoperability and the Recent NYT Puff Piece; A Reader Comments on Epic Interoperability and Care Everywhere; Judith Faulkner of Epic Becomes Target for Tea Baggers and the Religious Right).
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