Epic Systems Corporation, or Epic, is an American privately held healthcare software company. According to the company, hospitals that use its software held medical records of 78% of patients in the United States and over 3% of patients worldwide in 2022.
History
Epic was founded in 1979 by Judith R. Faulkner with a $70,000 investment (). Originally headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin, Epic moved its headquarters to a large campus in the suburb of Verona, Wisconsin in 2005, where it employs 10,000 people as of 2019. The campus has themed areas/buildings, such as a castle-like structure, a "Wizard Campus" that appears to be inspired by J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter, and a dining facility designed to mimic a train station.
As of 2015, the company was in the fifth phase of campus expansion with five new buildings each planned to be around 100,000 square feet. The company also has offices in Bristol, UK; , Netherlands; Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; Helsinki, Finland; Melbourne, Australia; Singapore; Trondheim, Norway; and Søborg, Denmark.
Product and market
Epic primarily develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells a proprietary electronic medical record software application, known in whole as 'Epic' or an Epic EMR. The company's healthcare software is centered on its Chronicles database management system. Epic's applications support functions related to patient care, including registration and scheduling; clinical systems for doctors, nurses, emergency personnel, and other care providers; systems for lab technologists, pharmacists, and radiologists; and billing systems for insurers. MyChart is used in the US and other countries to access doctors’ records and for billing purposes. It is used by 150 million patients across the US.
Epic also offers cloud hosting for customers that do not wish to maintain their own servers; and short-term optimization and implementation consultants through their wholly-owned subsidiary Boost, Inc.
The company's competitors include Cerner, MEDITECH, Allscripts, athenahealth, and units of IBM, McKesson, and Siemens.
The majority of U.S. News & World Report's top-ranked hospitals and medical schools use Epic. In 2003, Kaiser Permanente began using Epic for its electronic records system. Among many others, Epic provides electronic record systems for Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, the Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins Hospital, UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, and all Mayo Clinic campuses. Partners HealthCare began adopting Epic in 2015 in a project initially reported to cost $1.2 billion, which critics decried and which is greater than the cost of its buildings. By 2018, the total expenses for the project were $1.6 billion, with payments for the software itself amounting to less than $100 million and the majority of the costs caused by lost patient revenues, tech support and other implementation work.
In 2022 Emory Healthcare, Baptist Health and Memorial Hermann Health System all switched to Epic from Cerner.
Criticisms and controversies
Data sharing
Care Everywhere is Epic's health information exchange software, which comes with its electronic health record (EHR, or EMR) system. A 2014 article in The New York Times interviews two doctors who said that their Epic systems wouldn't allow them to share data with users of competitors' software in a way that will satisfy the Meaningful Use requirements of the HITECH Act. At first, Epic charged a fee to send data to some non-Epic systems. Epic said the yearly cost for an average-sized hospital was around $5,000 a year. However, after Congressional hearings, Epic and other major software vendors announced that they would suspend per-transaction sharing fees. Epic customers must still pay for one-time costs of linking Epic to each individual non-Epic system with which they wish to exchange data; in contrast, Epic's competitors have formed the CommonWell Health Alliance which set a common Interoperability Software standard for electronic health records. A 2014 report by the RAND Corporation noted the software was difficult and costly to use in conjunction with other billing systems. The report also cited other research showing that Epic's implementation in the Kaiser Permanente system led to efficiency losses.
In September 2017, Epic announced Share Everywhere, which allows patients to authorize any provider who has internet access to view their record in Epic and to send progress notes back. Share Everywhere was named Healthcare Dive's "Health IT Development of the Year" in 2017.