Epic founder and CEO Judy Faulkner said she sometimes has to tell customers "no" when she feels her products aren't quite ready.
Epic develops its EHR software in conjunction with customers then gets feedback from those early adopters to make improvements, Ms. Faulkner wrote in a Nov. 6 blog post. But sometimes other health systems hear about the new programs and want to use them too. She relayed the story of a time that happened with an Epic module.
"We said, 'If you are on paper, then our new system will help you, but if you use (name of another product), then that’s better than ours is now, so don’t switch,'" she recalled in the post. "'Someday, in the not-too-distant future, ours should be just as good or perhaps better, and then if you want it, we will sell it to you.'"
She wrote that her programming rule of thumb is that you "rewrite a product 50% for the second user, 25% for the third, 12.5% for the fourth, and so on."