Epic named its integrated interface Hyperspace because it “felt like a sci-fi moment,” company founder and CEO Judy Faulkner said.
Years ago, clinicians using Epic had to log in and out of each application individually, which is how most apps by most vendors worked at the time, Ms. Faulkner wrote in a Sept. 8 blog post. This was burdensome, so Epic decided to create a single interface for users based on their roles and permissions, in 2001.
“Software developers usually are science fiction readers,” Ms. Faulkner wrote. “This felt like a sci-fi moment — Hyperspace — where you leave one world and go to another — boom — like that, and you’re there. So that’s what we named it — Hyperspace.”
Science fiction was also the theme of Epic’s recent Users Group Meeting, in which the company unveiled some futuristic AI capabilities, such as predicting health events over a patient’s lifetime.
“Hyperspace allows users to move instantly between modules (‘worlds’),” Ms. Faulkner wrote. “We could do this because all the Epic apps run on one database and are developed as one interoperable system, instead of being separately acquired apps built by different companies.”
Epic has never purchased another company.
“At first, it seemed miraculous,” she added. “Now, it’s taken for granted. But it’s fun to look back at the name and remember how it all began.”
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