Health IT — well, it's complicated.
So says Epic founder and CEO Judy Faulkner, who recalled an inpatient EHR vendor CEO saying that the ambulatory side was "easy."
"It's not a discrete and bounded episode of care in the same way that an inpatient stay is. Ambulatory care patients don't get discharged," Ms. Faulkner wrote in an Aug. 5 blog post. "It's hard to take an inpatient system and make it work for ambulatory care. Ambulatory care is continuity of care, which requires some tricky programming. And even trickier is doing both in a shared manner, giving the complete view of the patient, both as a hospital inpatient and as an outpatient. Carry that further — at the dentist, in behavioral health, urgent care — everywhere care happens."
Epic's strategy of integrating all of a patient's medical records into one system has helped propel it to the market lead for EHRs. Ms. Faulkner's journey, she recalled, started when she took what was likely the first computers and medicine course at University of Wisconsin at Madison and noticed that no other health IT companies were offering a generally available clinical information system.
"My favorite T-shirt says, 'Healthcare IT is more complex than rocket science,'" Ms. Faulkner wrote. "The three Epic employees who used to work in rocket science agree."