Epic does multiday immersion trips at health systems to both educate the organizations on how to use the company's EHR and learn more about healthcare's technology needs.
"Oftentimes physicians will have a thought of how they would solve a problem," Jackie Gerhart, MD, vice president of clinical informatics at Epic, told Becker's at the HIMSS conference in Las Vegas. "But if we can actually have our developers there seeing the problem in real time, the answer the clinician might come up with might not be as efficient or as effective as something we could come up with to solve the problem in a better way."
The Epic developers might spot, say, a role for AI or automation in a previously manual process at the health system, she said.
Immersion trips are "part of our core requirements as software developers," said Sean McGunigal, director of AI at Epic. The excursions typically last a couple of days but no longer than a week. Developers take about a half-dozen immersion trips a year.
"Usually you try to get on site during go-lives, because that's an interesting way to get a view of how someone interfaces with the software who's never seen the software before," he said. "It's really helpful for us as a software company to take that back to the software."
Epic founder and CEO Judy Faulkner said in December that she lets the developers pick their own trips, unless it's for a big, yearslong project.