Judy Faulkner, CEO of Epic, discussed the company's vision to build a nationwide health IT infrastructure last week at the annual Users Group Meeting while dressed as Amelia Earhart, according to The Cap Times.
Ms. Faulkner has a history of dressing as characters and historical figures for her highly anticipated keynote address at the meeting every year, and this year she chose Ms. Earhart, the iconic female pilot, as a nod to the meeting's theme: A Night at the Museum. She talked about new technologies and expectations for Epic and its data platform, Cosmos.
Epic has moved from locally installed software to a web-based platform to increase access and make upgrades easier. In the first half of 2022, the company has worked with health system clients, including Boston-based Tufts Medicine, to transition Epic EHR to the cloud. But the digital transformation is far from over.
"We are building a nationwide health IT infrastructure to connect the different parts of healthcare," Ms. Faulkner told the crowd.
Epic's largest competitor in the hospital market, Oracle Cerner, is also on a mission to digitally connect the U.S. healthcare system. Larry Ellison, chair, co-founder and chief technology officer of Oracle, revealed in June the company's plans to build a unified national healthcare database after acquiring Cerner earlier this year for $28.4 billion. His vision of a national healthcare database includes anonymized data from hospitals, clinics and providers to give real-time information about patients' health as well as public health statistics.
The new announcements from Epic's User Group Meeting focused more on the iterations to make hospital processes more streamlined, including using artificial intelligence to optimize patient scheduling and adding a patient-matching function to Cosmos. The Cosmos "Look-alikes program will allow physicians to identify patients with similar symptoms and connect with those patients' physicians to share resources, according to the report.