Former healthcare CEO equates Epic customers, hostages

Former CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess, Paul Levy has noticed some disturbing similarities between the characteristics of Stockholm syndrome and the attitudes of customers of the Epic Systems toward to the electronic health record (EHR) vendor. Yesterday on his blog, Not Running a Hospital, Levy is raising plenty of eyebrows with his most recent entry, “The Stockholm Syndrome and EMRs,” in which he covers the company’s recent success in acquiring multi-million and billion dollar contracts with some of the nation’s top hospitals.

Most recently, Partners HealthCare signed on with Epic Systems to invest between $600 and $700 million over a ten-year period. As Levy claims, an obvious disconnect is emerging between what Epic customer’s believe the partnership will lead to and what the EMR hasn’t been able to achieve as of yet, interoperability. Despite spotty history of insufficient interoperability, Partners Chief Health Information and Innovation Office David Blumenthal, MD (former National Coordinator for Health Information Technology) viewed the agreement with Epic as a step in the right direction...

For Levy, this doesn’t mesh with statements made by Judy Faulkner, Founder and CEO of Epic "What is striking about this company is the degree to which the CEO has made it clear that she is not interested in providing the capability for her system to be integrated into other medical record systems.  The company also “owns” its clients in that it determines when system upgrades are necessary and when changes in functionality will be introduced."...