A newly published, in-depth piece about Epic Systems is remarkable for two things: It seemingly blames Epic and Epic alone for the lack of interoperability in health IT and it comes from a liberal stalwart, Mother Jones magazine.
Mother Jones ripped the massive electronic health records vendor for frivolity in its multi-themed “Intergalactic Headquarters” in bucolic Verona, Wisconsin. It paints CEO Judith Faulkner as an eccentric billionaire. (Faulkner really is pretty introverted, but she is quirky and certainly has her moments.)
The magazine said Epic happened to be in the right place at the right time when the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act passed in 2009. The law, part of the Obama administration’s stimulus package, created the $30 billion EHR incentive program known as Meaningful Use.
“Epic was shovel ready for this stimulus windfall. Faulkner’s company was one of the few software vendors back then offering an all-in-one package covering a hospital’s recordkeeping needs,” the story noted.
Meaningful Use of course hasn’t yet produced the type of interoperability policy-makers envisioned last decade. Members of the Republican-led Congress are getting antsy. Even the Obama administration has taken to calling out vendors and some large health systems for “information blocking.”
Mother Jones puts the heat squarely on Epic:
But instead of ushering in a new age of secure and easily accessible medical files, Epic has helped create a fragmented system that leaves doctors unable to trade information across practices or hospitals. That hurts patients who can’t be assured that their records—drug allergies, test results, X-rays—will be available to the doctors who need to see them. This is especially important for patients with lengthy and complicated health histories. But it also means we’re all missing out on the kind of system-wide savings that President Barack Obama predicted nearly seven years ago, when the federal government poured billions of dollars into digitizing the country’s medical records.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
The magazine cited a 2014 Rand report that “singled out” Epic for keeping out competition, as well as Epic’s continued refusal to join the CommonWell Health Alliance.
Mother Jones also noted that Faulkner has been a longtime donor to Democratic candidates, including Obama, and that she was a charter member of the federal government’s Health IT Policy Committee. (Current vendor representation on the committee is from Cerner CEO Neal Patterson.)
The ties to Obama of course stirred up the ire of conservative publications like the Free Republic, which in 2013 re-posted a piece from a reactionary blog that labeled Faulkner a “billionaire Obama crony.” (Comments on the original post mostly were sexist attacks, which is another problem.)
But, perhaps now that Epic has hired a lobbyist with close ties to the George W. Bush administration, a lefty magazine has taken aim at the company.
That suggests that ire about Meaningful Use is no longer a partisan issue. Everyone is fed up with the slow pace of interoperability, as illustrated by the Mother Jones author’s personal story of trying to get his own health information while being treated for cancer.
Is it one vendor’s fault? Of course not. But Epic is an easy target because of its size and even the design of its Wisconsin headquarters.
An Epic spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Photo: Flickr user Sarah Best
