Dr. Wachter calls Epic, both its product and business practices, a fine operation and asserts that it delivers what hospitals and health systems want, inter-operability and all.
Another defender, says Becker’s Hospital Review, is David Bates, chief quality officer at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston. He told Dr. Wachter that Epic’s platform is the only EHR system that offers most of the capabilities that an organization wants in an EHR. “If you make a big matrix of all the various things that you want as an organization, Epic covers many more of the boxes than others,” Mr. Bates said.
Still, as Becker’s notes, the hospital industry “by and large remains critical of Epic’s willingness to share data. Dr. Wachter argued in his book that the type of inter-operability the industry is gunning for isn’t the type of inter-operability many health leaders are focused on.”
