Epic is far more sophisticated and good than 90% of the other options in use by real hospitals today. I'm only half joking when I tell my friends in tech that it's hard for me to talk about what I've seen. Not just bad software but horrible 80s era curses GUIs, truly garbage proprietary query languages, systems with 100 different pieces of shoddy vendor garbage bolted on here and there to cover the gaps in their functionality.
Epic is best in class--and that's sad. Maybe 20 years from now we'll have EMR and patient accounting systems that will please 2015 HN.
But after I left the interview I did some research to find awful Glassdoor reviews of the company - the worst I've seen. There were also articles which alluded to heavy lobbying (not necessarily a bad sign, just weird) to get their software and services legally or protectively into hospitals.
Overall an interesting company that I'm glad I avoided.
And not to be a pedant, but Epic's big break was with Kaiser, Hopkins came a years or two later.
(fake) bitly . com /grandapas-chemo-meds
https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/05/31/partners-lau...
The company that provided the software is interesting:
http://www.epic.com/
Based in a suburb of Madison Wisconsin, founded in the mid 1970's by a grad student who wrote some software for a local hospital. They grew organically by word of mouth never spending on sales or marketing. They landed Johns Hopkins as a client years ago and now Epic chooses which hospitals are allowed to "invest" in their software. They hire young grads right out of college who have never worked anywhere else - who find themselves trapped with completely non-transferable skills. It is like this company evolved in complete isolation from any outside influence on software development.
Of course it is typical enterprise software developed by waterfall method that puts users last. My wife says the doctors are in open revolt. They have 1000's of open change requests - some critical to patient safety. For example the field to enter prescription instructions is only 64 characters. This is a hospital that administers chemotherapy so the instructions are more complicated than "take with food three times a day." The developer who got assigned that ticket had the nerve to suggest using abbreviations instead of making the change.