By the end of the week I think we will be plagued with tv ads from the Rose Law Firm......” Did one of your loved ones die from a medical miscommunication resulting from the use of the electronic records system called Epic? If so you might be entitled to monetary compensation”
I thought that Care Everywhere was Epic’s interoperability solution. As I understand, it displays encounter information from non-Epic systems as well as the native data, if the patient opts in or doesn’t opt out.
I am a Michelle M. fan, but this article reveals that she is talking outside of her knowledge base.
Massively complex medical records systems are imperfect, as are those who configure and use them. It is the human condition in complex systems. Those systems add certain types of risk, but at the same time they reduce many more risks inherent in the old paper records systems. New systems greatly improve many types of communications and prevent many errors and omissions.
In terms of Epic vs other vendor products, Epic has domfinated the free market in sales for one reason: it is by far the best system overall. It is massively expensive, but it is so much better that other products are not selling in the world of health system software solutions. Judy’s company simply built the best mousetrap, and she is pulling far ahead of everyone else. Too bad she is a big liberal, but the software is non-partisan...
A link to this thread has been posted on the Ebola Surveillance Thread
While I do not have direct knowledge of what happened at Texas Health Presbyterian, I do have direct knowledge of the Epic EMR software. I am not an Epic employee, but I do use Epic and configure it on a daily basis. It is my day job. I have it running right now on the same computer I'm writing this post on. My son (also not an Epic employee) has implemented their ASAP Emergency Department application in both adult and pediatric emergency departments in three hospitals. What I can say is this:
Epic is an extremely complicated, comprehensive, highly configurable, integrated system of computer applications. NO hospital installs Epic without doing massive configuration to customize it to run the way they want. Many of those customizations have to do with who sees what data entered by whom. It is far more likely that the problem at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital was due to the way they configured the system than to any inherent bug in Epic.
The fact that this has disappeared from the news is probably because Judy Faulkner, the owner/CEO/founder of Epic, probably called Texas Health Presbyterian and threatened to sue them for blaming their software. As soon as I saw that news article blaming Epic, I thought to myself "I'll bet Judy's gonna jump on that and squash it fast." And if it was due to Texas Health Presbyterian's configuration of Epic, and not to Epic itself, I don't blame her at all.
It will take them six weeks to find the right ICD 10 code for ebola...
Putting software in charge may be the problem. /s
What a bunch of BS.. anyone who has worked in Health Care IT can tell you first hand, pretty much ALL EMR systems stink... none are interoperable.. EPIC, CERNER... et al.. .they are all proprietary systems designed to keep you locked in, its the business model of every one of them, there is no business incentive to release the data.
Problems with the VISTA scheduling component were at the heart of the VA problems with patients not being seen.
Etc etc etc...
To try to spin this as a POLITICAL act is NONSENSE... Anyone buying into some political conspiracy around EPIC being what it is because it gives to democrats is an abject ignoramous or a flat out moron.
Post to me or FReep mail to be on/off the Bring Out Your Dead ping list.
The purpose of the “Bring Out Your Dead” ping list (formerly the “Ebola” ping list) is very early warning of emerging pandemics, as such it has a high false positive rate.
So far the false positive rate is 100%.
At some point we may well have a high mortality pandemic, and likely as not the “Bring Out Your Dead” threads will miss the beginning entirely.
*sigh* Such is life, and death...
Michelle is way out of her league here. Epic is one of the best EHRs available. I know. I’m stuck with one of the others...
I wish the title of this column was “Did Obamacare Kill Thomas Eric Duncan?” so people would actually read it.