Epic Insider Article

If you read this blog, then you’re probably as interested in the secretive Epic as me. So, you’ll love this article in the Madison paper from a former Epic employee talking about what it was like for him to work at Epic.

I’m sure I’ll do some more posts about a number of topics in this article in the future, but I was most intrigued by the strong culture that they’ve created at Epic. I always knew that it was the case, but it was really interesting to see it described first hand.

The donut day story in the article was a great example. You have to read the whole story in the article to know what I mean (go ahead and read it and I’ll be here when you get back).

While I’m someone who agrees that the company should be looking at the root causes for “Why” you do something, the story also makes me wonder if they get blinded by one vision and can’t see that there could by multiple Why’s for a certain task. I think this could apply to Epic and interoperability. They’ve taken a hard line because of a certain why that they have, but it seems to ignore the other 10 reasons why they should be more open. I think that this type of thinking will eventually catch up to them.

The other part of the article which struck me was all of the different ways that they approached hiring, managing, promotion, etc. No doubt hiring and firing the right people is the hardest thing to do in any business. Although, this insight from the article made me wonder if Epic is missing out on an opportunity to be even more than they are today:

Epic is teeming with talent but every year the company loses many employees it would have preferred to keep. There’s no silver-bullet solution to the turnover problem, but one place to start might be hiring more people who have worked in health care and can leverage their experience to connect with end users. One person from my project team who worked as a nurse before Epic hired him demonstrated exceptional rapport with a roomful of practitioners because he’d actually performed the relevant work in a clinical setting.

Diversity can be really beneficial to a company and I wonder if Epic couldn’t benefit from some diversity.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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