After Zina Moukheiber from Forbes was declined an interview with Judy Faulkner, CEO of Epic, last year Judy decided to talk to Zina about Epic in this article “An Interview With The Most Powerful Woman In Health Care.” Zina does a nice job on the interview and raises some of the questions many people have about Epic. It’s worth a read if you like to follow the hospital EHR world.
Many people are likely going to latch on to Zina calling Judy Faulkner the “most powerful woman in health care.” I don’t think that’s really up for discussion. Judy is the most powerful woman in healthcare and so I’m really glad that Judy is starting to join the discussion about Epic and healthcare. She has an important voice in the discussion and we need her participation. Although, I’m sure she’ll hate being called a billionaire in the article. The reality is we don’t know how much Judy’s really worth until we know how much Epic is worth and I’m not sure Epic plans to go public anytime soon.
Semantics aside, the most important part of the interview was the discussion of Epic being a closed system to which Judy frankly replied, “We are the most open system I know because we’re built as a database management system, and database management systems need to allow their users to mold it to what they need.” I think she really believes that Epic is an open system and quite frankly there aren’t that many in healthcare she can look to that are more open. Sure, a number of EHR vendors have worked to be more open, but even they aren’t as open as many other non health IT software systems. Maybe Judy hasn’t looked at the APIs outside of healthcare.
The real disconnect I had when reading Judy’s thoughts on being open is her lack of understanding of how a truly open API works. In a well implemented API, you can allow any and all programmers to be able to build applications on top of your software without those programmers needing to read your code and study your internal software. I’m not saying you don’t want and need to have an application and verification process for those people who want to tap into your API. This can be part of the process, but a well implemented and documented API can be open to everyone interested in building on top of your software. The value Epic would receive from so many companies iterating and extending the core Epic functionality would be amazing.
The other facet of Epic openness discussed in the article was around interoperability. Judy offered these comments on Epic’s ability to share patient records:
As of March 2013, our customers exchanged 760,000 patient records per month; about one-third were with non-Epic systems. Based on the historical trajectory, we expect that we’re closer to exchanging approximately one million records per month. We are currently exchanging data with Allscripts, Cerner, Department of Defense, Veteran Affairs Administration, Social Security Administration, eHealth Exchange (formerly Nationwide Health Information Network), Greenway, MEDITECH, NextGen and others. We expect to be exchanging data soon with eClinicalWorks, General Electric, Surescripts, and others.
This sounds good on face, but lets consider how many records Epic is sharing. Let’s use the round number of 1 million patient records shared per month. The article says that Epic has about half of the US population on Epic, or about 150 million patients. That means that about 0.67% of Epic’s patient records are being shared.
I’m happy to applaud Epic for sharing 1 million records a month with so many different vendors. My only complaint is that they could do so much more. For example, if you can share records between Epic and Cerner now, does that work for all Epic hospitals or do you have to do the new integration with every hospital that says they want to share records with Cerner? If it was a turn key way to integrate with Cerner, I’m quite sure that instead of 1% of Epic’s patient records being shared we’d see tens of millions of patient records flowing where they needed to go.
Many might remember my surprise breakfast with Judy Faulkner at the CHIME Forum. From my personal experience, Judy is not the black widow that I’ve heard many portray her to be. In fact, I found her incredibly thoughtful, caring, and really interested in quality patient care. That’s why I hope Judy will see that she’s sitting on an opportunity to do so much more than she’s doing now. Although, it will take a shift in her understanding of what it means to be an open EHR. Right now it seems her mostly unfounded fears won’t let her see the possibilities.
