Epic’s User Group Meeting (UGM) is a Healthcare Conference The Epic EHR is so ingrained in healthcare now that the UGM conference is really a healthcare conference, not an IT conference. This was a conference where more than 10,000 healthcare professionals met to share best practices about how to run a healthcare organization and deliver care, and oh by the way, the tool you’re using is this software called Epic.
There were clearly dominant themes this year among the priorities of the healthcare organizations in attendance: 1— Population health and ACOs 2— Patient-______: patient-engagement, patient-centeredness, patient reported outcomes, patient collected data, patient portal, etc 3— Health information exchange 4— Capture and use of discrete data by physicians 5— E-visits and video visits to improve access (and maybe end the long reign of the office visit) 6— Algorithms and analytics, especially with combining of multiple data sources 7— Personalized medicine using genomic data and home-collected data alongside traditional clinical data
Epic Should Do SaaS If I were Epic, I would develop a SaaS (Software as a Service) version (call it “EpicLite”) and cannibalize my own business from the bottom up. Epic is making some fantastic improvements to their software, but a major complaint you hear around the lunch tables at UGM is that no organization has the resources to implement all of Epic’s features and functions. Epic has made their software endlessly customizable in an attempt to please customers who asked them for such customization. But the end result is that we all bog ourselves down. I’d like to see Epic push back a bit more against what we all tell them we want, be bolder, and push out software to us all that just works out of the box. They can start with the “EpicLite” version and sell it to organizations less complex than the very large customers they most frequently serve now. Follow the 80/20 rule, pick the things that work best, and give it to people. I promise that we will complain, but then we will deal with it and save a lot of money and effort. They could then slowly move up-market with this SaaS version to sell it to the more complex and large customers in true Clayton Christiansen-esque disruptive innovation to disrupt their own core business. To analogize based on one of Christiansen’s examples, they won’t want to be selling mainframes in ten years when everyone wants PCs.
Open.Epic and Apple HealthKit Integration I’ve heard a lot of skepticism about this effort over the past year because Epic has always had the reputation of being a very closed system, but Open.Epic should change that perception. I think that this is going to be a big deal. I believe that a major reason for the lack of success of many digital health apps is that they are silos and built in standalone fashion. Let’s face it: the EHR is the hub of clinical workflows and no matter how cool and important your app is, it is still just an add-on. Apps cannot be successful if they don’t fit into clinical workflows. Therefore, to be successful, the workflow of using an app needs to blend in with the use of the EHR. Epic publishing APIs through Open.Epic for people to connect apps in is a game-changer and will enable an entirely new generation of apps that bolt on alongside the EHR.
Similarly, I think the Epic and Apple Healthkit integration will catalyze many of the currently stagnant use cases for sensor and device data, as it will now easily feed into the clinical environment.
Random Thoughts and Impressive Numbers I found myself wondering what Epic would be like if it were in Silicon Valley instead of Wisconsin. I don’t think it would be very Epic-like. You probably wouldn’t see them announcing next year’s product releases in the form of a musical.
It is hard to tell how much the healthcare system is shaping Epic’s software development plan versus the other way around. I’m sure it is some of both.
Epic is incredibly successful at energizing its customers and getting them to evangelize and espouse the virtues of their product for them. And we all pay to fly out to Wisconsin to do it! When I walked by it, their usability testing lab had a more than half-hour wait to get in and a line down the hallway.
54% of the US and 2.5% of the global population have an EpicCare chart. There were 5,000,000 Epic<—>Epic information exchanges in Aug 2014.
Comments