![]() This is a personal issue for me-I’m one of those Americans with a dizzyingly complex medical history. Unfortunately, in some ways, our medical records aren’t in any better shape today than they were before. “This will cut waste, eliminate red tape, and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests.” “Within five years, all of America’s medical records are computerized,” he announced in January 2009, when visiting Virginia’s George Mason University to unveil his stimulus plan. But it also means we’re all missing out on the kind of system-wide savings that President Barack Obama predicted nearly seven years ago, when the federal government poured billions of dollars into digitizing the country’s medical records. This is especially important for patients with lengthy and complicated health histories. That hurts patients who can’t be assured that their records-drug allergies, test results, X-rays-will be available to the doctors who need to see them. Kaiser Permanente, CVS’s Minute Clinics, Johns Hopkins, and Mount Sinai all use Epic.īut instead of ushering in a new age of secure and easily accessible medical files, Epic has helped create a fragmented system that leaves doctors unable to trade information across practices or hospitals. Epic pulled in $1.8 billion in 2014 and is expanding at a rate of about 1,000 new employees a year. Thanks to the White House’s stimulus-era initiative to bring the health care industry into the digital age, her company has grown into the country’s leading vendor of software in the $9.3 billion electronic health records (EHR) sector. Judith Faulkner, Epic’s 72-year-old founder and one of just 18 women on Forbes‘ list of self-made billionaires, often dresses in costume (Lucille Ball, a Hogwarts wizard) at the company’s annual meeting, which draws thousands of hospital executives and IT officers to the company’s 11,400-seat Deep Space Auditorium. A group of Harry Potter-inspired office buildings dubbed the “Wizards Academy” is currently under construction. One corridor is modeled to resemble a New York City subway car, complete with a statue of a homeless guy asleep on a bench. There’s a Dungeons & Dragons-themed building with a moat and a replica drawbridge. Epic’s HQ features a conference room tucked in a tree house. ![]() Nestled in the gently rolling hills of Verona, Wisconsin, a small Madison suburb, is the 1,000-acre “Intergalactic Headquarters” of Epic Systems, the multibillion-dollar company that claims its software manages medical records for 179 million Americans-or 56 percent of the country. ![]()
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