Epic doesn’t just want to sell health systems software anymore — it wants to staff their IT departments, too.
That’s the idea behind Epic Rangers, a new long-term staffing program the EHR giant unveiled at last week’s Users Group Meeting. Unlike Boost, Epic’s existing program for placing staff on time-limited projects, Rangers would embed Epic-hired, Epic-trained employees inside a health system’s own IT team on an extended basis.
“One thing I found very interesting is this past year we had 340,000 applicants for jobs. Many were highly qualified, but of course, we couldn’t hire them,” Epic CEO Judy Faulkner told the UGM crowd. “With Rangers, we’ll be able to hire and train more of these capable people to help you.”
Since Epic requires staff to work in person at its Verona, Wis., headquarters, Rangers offers a way for staff who need to relocate, often for personal reasons, to keep working for Epic without leaving the company altogether.
Some CIOs are already weighing what that could mean for the consulting firms they already pay to do exactly that kind of work.
Aaron Miri, DHA, chief digital and information officer of Jacksonville, Fla.-based Baptist Health, compared it to last year’s announcement of Epic’s coming AI scribe, which he said “somewhat froze the industry” for third-party voice and ambient dictation vendors.
“This could have the same chilling effect on the consulting companies out there … it would go compete head to head with some of the large consulting firms,” he told Becker’s at UGM.
Dr. Miri noted there’s precedent for vendors self-supplying implementation staff — enterprise resource planning vendors such as Workday do something similar — but said the model raises its own question: How will Epic maintain consistent quality if it scales Rangers quickly across many health systems at once?
Maggie Helms, senior vice president and chief data, AI and digital officer of Bloomington, Minn.-based HealthPartners, said her read was that Rangers would function like Boost but skew more technical, with “a long-term placement” rather than a project-based one.
Steven Beal, senior vice president and CIO of Fountain Valley, Calif.-based MemorialCare, said his understanding was that Rangers would remain “tethered to Epic in terms of employment, training, etc.,” whether they worked on-site or remotely — a point Sha Edathumparampil, chief digital and information officer of Coral Gables, Fla.-based Baptist Health South Florida, confirmed: Rangers would stay “on a fixed payroll” with Epic even while embedded at a customer’s health system.
Mr. Beal said his system already leans heavily on outside IT consulting, and he wasn’t sure how Rangers would change that calculus. “We have some folks that have been with us for like two years … in key strategic positions … because it’s hard to train the individuals and the talent pool,” he said. “So if [Epic] offer[s] a competitive [alternative] to this, it’ll be interesting.”
Asked whether his system would ever hire those staffers directly instead, Mr. Beal said funding constraints make that unlikely: MemorialCare’s roles are often tied to capital or expansion budgets that “could go away at any time,” which keeps outside staff in place for years at a time rather than being converted to employees.
Mr. Edathumparampil said Rangers lands in the middle of a consulting market that’s already shifting. “There’s been a whole bunch of private equity and M&A activity in this space,” he said, pointing to investment firms acquiring Epic service providers, and “a number of these companies had set up offshore” operations in Colombia and Costa Rica over the past six months. “I don’t know where this will fit in, in terms of cost … it’ll be super interesting to watch.”
Dr. Miri, for his part, said Epic’s track record could work in Rangers’ favor even if the consulting market gets disrupted. “Epic has a very high bar for training and for knowledge retention and mastery, so you can bank on the quality,” he said. “When you go with third-party services, you kind of don’t know — you’re just going to get what you get. … At least here, you probably [have] a baseline that’s solid.”
Amy Trainor, BSN, RN, vice president and chief information officer of New Orleans-based Ochsner Health, saw a more direct use case for Rangers: “I could see [it helping] on some applications that are hard to find resources — Beaker is one of them,” she said, referring to Epic’s laboratory information system. “Not a lot of resources exist in the third-party field. We would want to come to [Epic] for things like that.”
But Ms. Trainor also sees Epic’s hiring pitch as a mirror of her own health system’s. “We have a similar hiring strategy for our Epic team … we hire for qualities like humble, hungry and smart. You can have [no specific] degree, and we don’t care — we’ll train you,” she said. “We would love those same innovative folks that [Epic is] trying to hire to come work for us too.”
She added that with 340,000 people applying to Epic for jobs it couldn’t fill, “maybe we should think about how to help them find places” at health systems directly.
At the Becker's 11th Annual IT + Revenue Cycle Conference: The Future of AI & Digital Health, taking place September 14–17 in Chicago, healthcare executives and digital leaders from across the country will come together to explore how AI, interoperability, cybersecurity, and revenue cycle innovation are transforming care delivery, strengthening financial performance, and driving the next era of digital health. Apply for complimentary registration now.
