Epic First Impressions

Ten years ago, I was at an Epic user conference in Madison, WI. This year, I ventured back to see what has changed over the past decade.

Thirteen years ago I had my first interaction with Epic. I was trying to understand the difference between MedicaLogic (now GE Centricity EMR), Epic, and several other players. After calling all the vendors, only one did not return my call. Any guesses? That’s right, Epic didn’t respond to my first, second, third or fourth calls. After that, I determined Epic was clearly a difficult vendor to deal with, and likely didn’t have anything of value to offer the market.

Here we are 13 years later and my assessment has only partially changed. Want a call back from Epic? Don’t hold your breath. Nothing to offer the market? Hardly the case! That was solidified as I watched the 6,500 customers at the company’s user group meeting, along with many new organizations now in the Epic camp, such as Duke, Johns Hopkins and Loma Linda.

So why do I bring this up? I sometimes hear that KLAS is an “Epic bigot.” I suppose that is something like Consumer Reports being a Honda bigot or Moody’s being a U.S. T-Bills bigot. I was shocked back in 1999 when they first rated as the best vendor in our annual report, especially after my initial encounter – or lack of an encounter – with them, but it’s become crystal clear that first impressions can sometimes be deceiving.