Epic Systems

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AthenaHealth's Plan To Fix Health Care Hinges On Tiny Hospitals

Christina Farr | Fast Company | June 29, 2016

Edmund Billings spends about three weeks out of the month living out of a suitcase. He racked up 20,000 miles on the road in the past nine months, while driving to some of the most rural and remote parts of the country. Billings is a traveling salesman of sorts, but his business isn't vacuum cleaners or encyclopedias. It's health software. Billings is the associate chief medical officer for acute care at AthenaHealth, an IT company with a market cap of more than $5 billion that provides software and mobile apps for patient care and billing, including a cloud-based electronic health record...

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Barack Obama Puts Cronyism Above Cybersecurity

Michelle Malkin | michellemalkin.com | July 29, 2015

Just last week, the UCLA Health system run by Epic suffered a cyber attack affecting up to 4.5 million personal and medical records, including Social Security numbers, Medicare and health-plan identifiers, birthdays and physical addresses...The university’s top doctors and medical staff market their informatics expertise and consulting services to other Epic customers “to ensure the successful implementation and optimization of your Epic EHR.” Will they be sharing their experience having to mop up the post-cyber-attack mess involving their Epic infrastructure?...

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Big Tech Should Stay Out of Healthcare

Matthew Buck | Washington Monthly | December 2, 2019

...The use of digital technology in health care has enormous promise, to be sure. But, as the Wall Street Journal's coverage of Google's Project Nightingale revealed, there is also a potential dark side to these projects. Ascension, it noted, "also hopes to mine data to identify additional tests that could be necessary or other ways in which the system could generate more revenue from patients, documents show." That detail raises a key question that's largely overlooked in our health care debates: should the drive to maximize corporate revenues determine how health information technology develops and becomes integrated into medical practice, or should that be determined by medical science and the public?...An alternative path exists. In the 1970s, the Veterans Affairs Administration (VA) developed VistA, an open-source code system that was the country's first EHR system... Read More »

Burlington hospital expansion includes buying a $160 million EHR System

Steven Rosenberg | The Boston Globe | August 11, 2013

Lahey Health plans to spend over $170 million on its hospital facilities, with a new $162 million electronic medical records system as the centerpiece. Read More »

Cerner, Leidos, Accenture Plan Joint Bid for Defense EHR Contract

Joseph Conn | Modern Healthcare | June 26, 2014

Cerner Corp. has entered an alliance with experienced government contractors Leidos and Accenture Federal Services to make a play for the multibillion-dollar contract to build, install and configure a replacement electronic health-record system for the Defense Department's health system. Read More »

CFOs Stress Need for Next Generation RCM Tools but Hefty MU Investments Deplete Many Hospital’s Cash Reserves, Black Book Survey Reports

Press Release | Black Book | November 3, 2014

Seventy-nine percent of hospital CFOs running outdated financial systems say they nervously face the coming year without evolved Revenue Cycle tools. Continued meaningful use expenses for EHR, HIE, analytics, portals and mobile apps are hitting hospitals hard as changes in payment models based on patient compliance, pricing transparency, and population health demand even more capital...

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County health doctors air complaints about their new [EPIC] EMR system

Matthias Gafni | Contra Costa Times | September 19, 2012

One of every 10 emergency room patients at the county's public hospitals in September left without ever being seen by a doctor or nurse because of long waits -- a number rising since implementation of Contra Costa's $45 million [EPIC] computer system July 1. One patient waited 40 hours to get a bed.

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COVID-19 Will Be The Ultimate Stress Test For Electronic Health Record Systems

Eric D. Perakslis and Erich Huang | STAT | March 12, 2020

As the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19 continues its march around the world and through the United States, it is spawning another kind of infection: Covid-19 cyber threats aimed at individuals and health systems. We aren't crying wolf here. Disaster planning experts know all too well that preexisting weaknesses become worse during crises. The WannaCry cyber attack that devastated the United Kingdom's National Health Service is a good example. Outdated infrastructure containing components with long-understood vulnerabilities are a hacker's paradise...The undeniable fact that electronic health record systems are designed to track and bill procedures rather than provide optimal patient care is likely to be on full display as the health system becomes increasingly saturated with Covid-19 patients.

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Crony Capitalist Epic Systems Gets Rich by Manipulating Stimulus Timeline

Pejman Yousefzadeh | All Fired Up Media | February 27, 2012

Newspapers and bloggers have spilled a lot of real and digital ink in recent months over the Department of Energy’s controversial stimulus-created loan guarantee program, the now-defunct green tech firm Solyndra, and its wealthy benefactor/Obama campaign bundler George Kaiser. Too few are paying attention to the government’s push for widespread health information technology adoption, funded in large part by the stimulus bill, and key industry players exerting influence over the policy process for personal benefit. If you haven’t yet heard of Wisconsin-based Epic Systems and its CEO Judith Faulkner, pay attention.

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CVS Minute Clinic Experience Is Efficient And Effective, But EHR Interoperability Isn't

Neil Versel | Forbes.com | July 21, 2014

Back in February, major pharmacy chains including Walgreen Co., CVS Caremark, Rite Aid, Kroger and Safeway all announced via the White House website — an official channel if there ever was one — that they were endorsing the Blue Button initiative...

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Digital Health Records’ Risks Emerge As Deaths Blamed On Systems

Jordan Robertson | Bloomberg | June 25, 2013

When Scot Silverstein’s 84-year-old mother, Betty, starting mixing up her words, he worried she was having a stroke. So he rushed her to Abington Memorial Hospital in Pennsylvania... Read More »

Doctors Are Overloaded with Electronic Alerts, and That’s Bad for Patients

Shefali Luthra | The Washington Post | June 13, 2016

Some people receive constant reminders on their smartphones: birthdays, anniversaries, doctor’s appointments, social engagements. At work, their computers prompt them to meet deadlines, attend meetings and have lunch with the boss. Prodding here and pinging there, these pop-up interruptions can turn into noise to be ignored instead of helpful nudges. Something similar is happening to doctors, nurses and pharmacists. And when they’re hit with too much information, the result can be a health hazard...

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Doctors Find Barriers to Sharing Digital Medical Records

Julie Creswell | New York Times | September 30, 2014

...While most providers have installed some kind of electronic record system, two recent studies have found that fewer than half of the nation’s hospitals can transmit a patient care document, while only 14 percent of physicians can exchange patient data with outside hospitals or other providers...

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DoD EHR Contract: Open Source Vs. Commercial

David F. Carr | Information Week | October 31, 2014

Pricewaterhouse Coopers and partner firms urge Department of Defense to consider open source VistA for EHR contract, vying against IBM/Epic and other commercial contenders. Read More »

DoD Healthcare Exec Pushes $11 Billion IT Upgrade, But Unwittingly Reveals Why It Won’t Work

Loren B. Thompson | Lexington Institute | April 8, 2015

On March 25, the program executive overseeing a proposed modernization of the military healthcare records system testified before the Senate’s defense appropriations subcommittee. Christopher A. Miller urged committee members to support a costly upgrade to the way in which the healthcare records of military personnel and their dependents are stored and shared — which at a projected price-tag of $11 billion will be the biggest investment in an electronic health record system ever undertaken. If past experience with such IT projects is any indication it will end up costing a lot more, but that’s not the real problem. The real problem, as Miller unwittingly revealed in his testimony, is an acquisition strategy that can’t deliver what the department needs... Read More »