About

Epic Issues?

In 2011, a recruiter called me about a job opportunity in my home town of Fresno to work in the hospital where I was born as an Epic Clinical Systems Manager. At the time, it was called Community Medical Centers in Fresno, California.

The people I worked with were awesome, and I enjoyed working hard to learn new technologies.

Epic Failures?

During my three years at Community Health Systems in Fresno, then Community Medical Systems, I had mixed experiences with Epic that left me disappointed and wanting to warn other healthcare systems to beware and consider other alternatives.

In my experience and opinion,

• Epic is overpriced enough to run many hospitals into bankruptcy.
• Epic is brutally unfair and dishonest in some of their certification exam scoring.
• Epic operates with a conflict of interest in scoring those exams as they have opportunity and motive both politically and financially to withhold certification.
• Much of this motive is tied to their Good Maintenance Discount that may be $250,000/year.
• Much of this is more likely to maintain unfair control over their customer’s management team.
• Epic’s cost of ongoing maintenance internally and externally is likely far too high in human resources.
• Other solutions such as VistA are as good or better and far less costly.
• Epic’s practice of changing certification rules midstream and requiring recertification frequently while reporting scores to management can be unfair, dishonest, and psychologically traumatic enough to drive some people to suicide.
• Epic’s hiring practices seem to favor hiring brilliant but inexperienced youth from top universities and possibly discriminating against those over 30.

In all, I question why anyone in management would promote installing Epic at such a high and unnecessary cost. It does not seem fiduciarily responsible.