Epic built its business on one product: the EHR. But some CIOs say the company is trying to be the answer to nearly everything else, too — and they’re not all sure it should be.
At its Aug. 17-20 Users Group Meeting, the EHR giant detailed expansion into at least three areas well outside its historical core: a full enterprise resource planning suite called EpicOps; a new long-term IT staffing program called Rangers that could reshape the health IT consulting market; and AI tools increasingly capable of doing the work of junior IT analysts.
“You can only do so many good things at once,” Aaron Miri, DHA, executive vice president and chief digital and information officer of Jacksonville, Fla.-based Baptist Health, told Becker’s.
He pointed to Rangers as an example, comparing Epic’s expanding workforce ambitions to last year’s launch of its ambient AI documentation tool, which he said “somewhat froze the industry” for third-party dictation vendors. “This could have the same chilling effect on the consulting companies out there … it would go head-to-head with some of the large consulting firms.”
Dr. Miri noted there’s precedent in the market for vendors self-supplying implementation staff — enterprise resource planning vendors such as Workday do something similar with their own deployment teams. “I do question: Is Epic getting … a little too big for its britches right now?” he said. “It could be core-focusing on AI and data and other things, which are right in its backyard.”
He was careful not to frame this as a conclusion: “I’m simply asking the question … because I want them to stay high quality. It’s important.”
Epic disputes the idea that Rangers reflects the company overreaching. “Our Boost program — in which Epic staff are embedded with our customer teams for a set period of time — is extremely popular,” a company spokesperson told Becker’s. “Demand for Boost assignments consistently exceeds supply, and customers often extend or renew Boost assignments to keep those staff in place. Epic Rangers is intended to meet a need many of our customers have raised — it will let organizations keep Epic-hired and -trained staff on a longer-term assignment, helping customers get the full value of the software they’ve invested in.”
Not every CIO sees Epic’s expanding footprint as cause for concern — for some, it’s the safer bet. Tom Bentley, BSN, RN, chief information and digital technology officer of Columbus-based Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, said watching Epic’s Art, Emmy and Penny AI tools work together convinced him to keep consolidating onto Epic’s platform rather than maintaining third-party applications.
“We really need to question any point solutions that we’re using and stick with more platform solutions like Epic,” he said. “We might be able to gain a little bit of ground in a little bit of a niche area, but in the long run, I think it’s going to hurt us and slow us down.”
Even so, Mr. Bentley isn’t ready to hand Epic his organization’s ERP business. OSU Wexner still runs a separate platform and is only cautiously testing a few EpicOps modules, such as operating room supply management. “We feel pretty good about a few of the aspects of it,” he said, “but that [a fuller transition] was probably a ways off for us.”
Geoff Patterson, senior vice president and chief digital and information officer of Henry Ford Health in Detroit, sounded more optimistic about eventually adopting EpicOps, even though the timeline doesn’t line up for his system yet. Epic has said the suite won’t be built out system-wide until 2029, he said — “we probably can’t wait that long,” given Henry Ford still runs on a “30-year-old version of PeopleSoft.”
Still, he said Epic Ops’ ability to tie utilization data directly to the clinical record is “something we’ve never seen from an ERP partner,” and he expects Henry Ford to adopt it eventually, once it’s matured. “We’ll probably be in the next truck,” he said. “We won’t be the only adopters.”
Epic said its ERP push answers a request it’s long heard from customers, not a bid to move into an unrelated market. “For years, our customers have been asking us to build a healthcare ERP,” the spokesperson said. “EpicOps is built from the ground up to meet the specific needs of healthcare organizations. Traditional ERPs are designed for manufacturing and retail. EpicOps is purpose-built for healthcare, with areas such as clinician scheduling, medication supply chains, credentialing, and cost accounting tied to clinical outcomes.”
A third front touches health systems’ own analyst pipelines. At its UGM keynote address, Epic unveiled Analyst Build Assistant, an AI tool designed to help junior IT analysts complete build work that used to take hours in minutes; the company said it plans to expand the tool so agents can eventually make routine build changes and troubleshoot production issues largely on their own.
That shift raised workforce questions for Bobbie Byrne, MD, executive vice president and CIO of Charlotte, N.C.-based Advocate Health. “Epic is releasing new tools that will assist the junior analysts in their work,” she said. “What are the changes we need to make in how we onboard, and what are the staffing levels for the future? How do we grow the senior analyst of the future in this new world?”
For now, CIOs are not asking whether Epic can keep growing — they are confident it will — but whether it can execute successfully everywhere at once, from its core EHR business to the new ground it’s chasing in ERP and IT staffing. Most CIOs interviewed said they’re withholding judgment. As Dr. Miri put it: “It’s a question mark.”
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