When Epic created its first billing system, it charged $3,000 — less than it cost the EHR vendor to make.
Epic had agreed to create the software for a small community health system for that price, even though the company had never done anything like it before, founder and CEO Judy Faulkner recalled in an Oct. 2 blog post. The health system explained it would be easy: "The patient gets care. You list the services and their costs, add them up, and send the bill to the patient. Then, when the patient pays you, you subtract the payment from the total owed and keep the new value."
"That’s not too hard to do, we thought," Ms. Faulkner wrote."As we started working on it, it became obvious that billing was much, much, much more complex."
Epic still delivered the system for $3,000, even though it cost "many times that to create," she recalled.
But the loss was a lesson learned for the then-five-year-old company that is now the No. 1 provider of EHRs to U.S. hospitals. One, Ms. Faulkner said, it has remembered "to this day."
"When people do something a lot, they usually don't realize the complexity of what they do," she wrote. "There are so many parts that they intuitively know to do without thinking about it. Like muscle memory. As a result, realize that when they describe the work needed to you, they are often missing a lot and inadvertently making the work seem much simpler than it really is."