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Epic Tells Customers It Will Stop Google Cloud Integrations

healthcareitnews.com

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Re: Epic Tells Customers It Will Stop Google Cloud Integrations

#111
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially when Amazon is making moves into insurance and pharmacy spaces

The difference is Amazon won't use confidential AWS data to drive their other verticals. Google's very business model is selling their users to their customers.

What do you mean by this? All major corporations use private internal data to drive their products, including competing with their own customers. Amazon's ecommerce business is notorious for this and a reason why other major retailers tell their vendors not to use AWS. This was all just discussed days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22079174

That being said, and with 15 years of adtech of experience, I guarantee that there's absolutely no usage of business customers' first party data by Google's adtech system. While companies can use it to match and target their users, they have to do explicitly with lots of restrictions and protocols and it's only become more limited with new privacy regulations.

Re: Epic Tells Customers It Will Stop Google Cloud Integrations

#112
post #110
post #105

Does anyone know, if Epic implemented parallelized Vulkan renderer in their engine, or they dropped the whole parallelization effort and enabling Vulkan for high end features? If anyone is using it for development, please comment. Epic "archived" their TODO item on Trello: https://trello.com/c/lzLwtb5P/124-vulkan-for-pc-and-linux

Epic is not Epic - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Systems - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_Store

Oh, thanks for clarifying, I confused them with different Epic indeed.

Re: Epic Tells Customers It Will Stop Google Cloud Integrations

#113
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious q: are the other systems any better? Have you tried them? Have you compared notes with physicians using them? (I'm new to the field and genuinely curious... I haven't heard anybody saying anything nice about any of them...)

I have not used all of them, but every one of them I've touched is hot garbage. Like much enterprise software, the people who decide to buy it are not the people that use it. It would seem, from the outside looking in, that the majority of the effort goes into maximizing billing in the byzantine world of US insurance rather than the work of actually making people well. What concerns me most about the larger players i…

Did you type this out on an iPhone?

Re: Epic Tells Customers It Will Stop Google Cloud Integrations

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but: > That report notes that "insufficient interest" from Epic customers in Google is behind the decision to focus efforts instead with those cloud competitors. It seems like if you run Epic Systems at Google, you were in a minority that is apparently not worth supporting. This seems less like Epic putting their thumb on the scale, and more like their customers putting their thumb on the scale.

I have only limited experience in the healthcare space when it comes to cloud selection, but I can tell you that every single healthcare company I work with uses Azure. They don't do it because it may or may not be right for their needs. They pick Azure because somewhere along the line the mid- and upper-level managers, including director-level IT people, have been made to believe that anything other than Windows is…

I think that's because before this whole cloud thing came about, Microsoft already had built the image as an enterprise software vendor. They provided hosted cloud solutions long back, then they invented hybrid solutions like Azure Stack and slowly and carefully eased their clients into Azure.

Also, Microsoft support for enterprise customers is just amazing. They have been deploying their own engineers to support enterprise customers in the past for their hosted clouds.

Cant mention much about security but Microsoft does open fewer lower level Apis compared to Linux. For example, it's impossible to do certain socket-level ops with Windows apis. So, in a sense I guess it makes Windows safer at least historically?

Re: Epic Tells Customers It Will Stop Google Cloud Integrations

#115
Epic is a cash cow private company. Sutter Health in the Bay Area paid $1B for its EHR. Epic stays quiet to protect its walled gardens; deeply integrated into hospital infrastructure. No doubt Google is a threat to them.

Here’s an old article I found that references this juicy revenue opportunity (the rest have been cleared by Epic, so the story goes): https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/setback-sutter-after-1...

Re: Epic Tells Customers It Will Stop Google Cloud Integrations

#116
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a physician forced to use Epic, I'm not sure "crafted" is the word I'd use to describe their software. It's more like they addressed the spec from the C suite in a way that was equivalent to punching health care providers in the face. They take Dad's money, and use it to pay thugs to beat up his kids.

Serious q: are the other systems any better? Have you tried them? Have you compared notes with physicians using them? (I'm new to the field and genuinely curious... I haven't heard anybody saying anything nice about any of them...)

One of my first jobs was a software dev at Cerner. Cerner isn't much better.

EMR is a difficult field to "disrupt" IMO because a hospital comprises so many departments with wildly different requirements for a software system, that it's basically only the big players who can do it all. And if you're a CIO for a hospital looking for an EMR system to purchase, one system that handles everything sounds much more appealing than trying to cobble together something yourself.

It's also why there's only a few major ERP players.

Re: Epic Tells Customers It Will Stop Google Cloud Integrations

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying no one likes it, I'm saying none of the several dozen providers and nurses I know (between two different hospitals in the area using Epic) like it. I also don't disagree with the fact that some of the issues arise from the implementation requirements. But at some point, it's still the system's fault if it allows its users to be burdened like that. It shouldn't take clicking across three different pages…

I fundamentally disagree with the idea that the system can somehow overcome poor implementation; guardrails can only do so much. At the end of the day you can set up almost any piece of software in a way that hinders rather than helps a user. At some point the organization needs to take some responsibility for that. At any rate, this all started with a glib "garbage software" comment, so I suppose I should happy that…

I used to work in IT where I worked with sizeable Epic installations... and now I’m a clinician amongst other things.

I’m going to agree with the garbage software sentiment.

I will say that Epic implementations tend to be liked better than alternatives... but when it replaced some piece of shit Meditech implementation nursed from 1980 that’s not really high praise dude.

Re: Epic Tells Customers It Will Stop Google Cloud Integrations

#118
post #8

Googler, opinions are my own. WSJ has had some good converge about parallel medical record stories that are going on right now too, as has CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/17/epic-systems-warns-customers... https://www.wsj.com/articles/paging-dr-google-how-the-tech-g... WSJ podcast about it: https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/why-google-is-pushi... To quote the end of the WSJ article: > Existing players in th…

>> “We could never pin down Google on what their true business model was,” says a Cerner executive involved in the discussions.

I think they really do understand what the Google true business model is, and this is exactly why they say that and avoid giving Google the access to the data.

Re: Epic Tells Customers It Will Stop Google Cloud Integrations

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but: > That report notes that "insufficient interest" from Epic customers in Google is behind the decision to focus efforts instead with those cloud competitors. It seems like if you run Epic Systems at Google, you were in a minority that is apparently not worth supporting. This seems less like Epic putting their thumb on the scale, and more like their customers putting their thumb on the scale.

I have only limited experience in the healthcare space when it comes to cloud selection, but I can tell you that every single healthcare company I work with uses Azure. They don't do it because it may or may not be right for their needs. They pick Azure because somewhere along the line the mid- and upper-level managers, including director-level IT people, have been made to believe that anything other than Windows is…

I'm not surprised. Azure is the obvious choice at the enterprise level since it's MS makes it relatively easy to sync on-prem Active Directory into Azure AD.

Re: Epic Tells Customers It Will Stop Google Cloud Integrations

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty pessimistic and quite frankly not accurate assessment of the software. They have a ton of clinical functionality, and that's what the majority of the dev/design spends their time on at their users group meeting, among other places. You might not like it, but many do.

My clinical experience with Epic is limited to emergency care, but I've yet to meet a clinical user that "likes" Epic.

I'll be the first, then. I've used two versions of Cerner (the first was heavily modified by the University where I did residency and the second is a more recent version), Soarian, Epic, CPRS, and had brushings with half a dozen outpatient EMRs. Epic is bad, but it's unfortunately still miles better than anything else I have ever used so far.
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