Early in the company’s history, Epic created EHRs for both inpatient and outpatient care but then decided to concentrate on where there was less competition: the ambulatory side.
Founder and CEO Judy Faulkner believed health systems would eventually want an EHR for both, so in five years the company would pick up inpatient again. And that’s what Epic did.
“When we said we were going back into inpatient, consultants, advisors and other healthcare experts told us not to,” Ms. Faulkner recalled in a July 7 blog post. “They told us that other vendors had been doing inpatient for years. That we were too late. That it was too hard. And so on. Not a single expert group supported our decision to develop inpatient. But they also didn’t realize that we had done it before and knew a lot about it.”
At the time, she told her staff that within a year Epic would have a single EHR that integrated both ambulatory and inpatient facilities, because health systems would want all their patient information in one place.
“The staff gasped, and everyone at Epic now who was there at the time still remembers that meeting. We were heads down for a year, and we got it done,” she wrote. “Obviously, because we’re continuing to work on this ever since, there was (and is) more and more to do. Over time, we have added many more modules and made the system more robust and easier to use.”
