Crony Capitalist Epic Systems Gets Rich by Manipulating Stimulus Timeline

Pejman Yousefzadeh | All Fired Up Media | February 27, 2012

Newspapers and bloggers have spilled a lot of real and digital ink in recent months over the Department of Energy’s controversial stimulus-created loan guarantee program, the now-defunct green tech firm Solyndra, and its wealthy benefactor/Obama campaign bundler George Kaiser. Too few are paying attention to the government’s push for widespread health information technology adoption, funded in large part by the stimulus bill, and key industry players exerting influence over the policy process for personal benefit. If you haven’t yet heard of Wisconsin-based Epic Systems and its CEO Judith Faulkner, pay attention...

In her capacity as the lone industry representative on the Health IT Policy Committee, created by the HITECH Act of the stimulus bill, Judith Faulkner has argued for a delay in the implementation of Stage 2 criteria. She pressed for the delay to last six months; eventually, the Department of Health and Human Services decided that it would delay implementation for one year, which means that the implementation of Stage 2 criteria now will not take effect until 2014. Commenting on Stage 2 implementation, Faulkner said that “[i]f we don’t know how long it will take vendors to do the work, we don’t know how long it will take for providers to get up and running,” and has expressed concern regarding the ability of doctors to spend time with their patients.

Like the promise of “a clean energy future,” all of this sounds laudable . . . until one recognizes that Epic stands to benefit from a delay of Stage 2 implementation....Perhaps Faulkner didn’t intend for this arrangement to benefit Epic directly. Indeed, since it is impossible to read her mind, let’s assume for the sake of argument that she didn’t. But when one considers that both Faulkner and Murphy served on the Health IT Policy Committee, it is more than a little unsettling to contemplate the possibility that committee members might make deals that would serve to benefit particular industry players. At the very least, the conflict of interest that might have helped fuel the drive to delay the implementation of Stage 2 criteria ought to have been recognized, and commented on in public...