Epic’s approach to maintaining its position atop the KLAS rankings has been rooted in consistency rather than reinvention, according to founder and CEO Judy Faulkner.
For the 16th consecutive year, Epic was named the top Overall Health System Suite by KLAS. The EHR vendor also earned Best in KLAS recognition in 11 market segments.
In a video interview posted to LinkedIn by KLAS on July 6, Ms. Faulkner told KLAS CEO and co-founder Adam Gale that Epic’s continued success stems from hiring strong employees, investing in training, maintaining close relationships with customers and continuously improving its software.
“I think our success is just being consistent in doing what we try to always do,” she said.
Ms. Faulkner said Epic has also built on that foundation by completing its web migration, freeing more programmers to work on new initiatives. She said the company is expanding its work with payers through Epic’s Payer Platform, prior authorization, life sciences and Cosmos, Epic’s research database that enables participating health systems to analyze deidentified patient data at scale, and is beginning to see “the compounding effects” of those efforts.
“Those new areas are becoming increasingly important,” she said.
When asked which changes had the biggest impact on customers over the past year, Ms. Faulkner pointed to the combination of Epic’s revenue cycle platform and artificial intelligence.
“We already have a strong revenue cycle product, and AI is helping move work along,” she said.
Ms. Faulkner said Epic has also focused on using AI to support utilization management, improve operating room efficiency and help customers implement Fast Pass, an Epic scheduling tool that automatically offers newly available appointments to eligible patients when cancellations occur. She said those efforts have helped improve customers’ financial performance.
From a customer satisfaction standpoint, Ms. Faulkner said Cosmos has also stood out, particularly its “look-alikes” capability, which enables users to identify patients with similar characteristics across participating health systems.
“I think Cosmos with look-alikes had a lot of happy people,” she said.
Looking ahead, Ms. Faulkner said Epic plans to continue expanding into new areas, including clinical trials management systems, enterprise resource planning, pharmacy and payer technology.
“I think the compounding effect of working across all of those new areas will be very interesting,” she said.
But even as the company broadens its portfolio, Ms. Faulkner said Epic’s overall strategy will remain the same.
“We just need to continue doing what we do. That gets back to the first answer: consistency,” she said.
Ms. Faulkner said that means continuing to hire and train employees, listen to customers, help them use Epic’s products and continue improving the software.
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