Epic
Mecca

December 28, 2017 -- Today I went to Mecca. (Click image for full size.) Well, not exactly Mecca, but certainly the center of universe of EHRs (electronic health records) -- the opulent corporate headquarters of Epic in Verona, Wisconsin. (I have blogged about Epic before.) It is by far the leading vendor of these systems, with the largest market share and growing.

The EHR (formerly EMR, electronic medical record) is a passion of mine. I built one back in 1980-1983 as my Master's thesis when I was in graduate school at UCSF. It was a real one and was even briefly in live service in UCSF's outpatient dermatology clinic. (I had this access because my thesis advisor, the reverently-remembered Dr. Marsden Scott Blois, was a practicing physician in that clinic... And HIPAA did not yet exist.) Its name was Encounter Data System (EDS) because its function was to capture and report information about patient encounters: demographics, diagnoses, procedures performed. It was written in C, ran on a Digital Equipment Corp. VAX computer running Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix, with a UC Berkeley-developed database named Ingres (that "spoke" not SQL but Quel, a predecessor) as its backend (data storage and retrieval). It really worked.

I suppose I could have made a career of it; Judith Faulkner (the sole owner of privately-held Epic and now one of the richest women in the world) certainly did. Alas, being too early is just as fatal as being too late.

I mean no sour grapes to Ms. Faulkner nor to her company; their product is in many ways brilliant and their success is well-earned. And -- as I saw today -- the offices that success can build are spectacular indeed.

Click the thumbnail image to see it full size: yours truly at the head of an Epic Boardroom table.

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