Is It Epic’s Fault or Your Health System’s?

August 25, 2021
John Lynn
4 Min Read

In another in our ongoing series that highlights issues with the EHR vs how a health system configures the EHR comes this tweet from Stacy Hurt:

For those not familiar with Hurt, she’s a great patient advocate, cancer survivor, caregiver to her son, and a strong voice for patients.  You can imagine her frustration when she can’t simply upload the required documents in Epic’s MyChart.

While she blames Epic for this, if you look through the thread, it’s pretty clear that it’s how the health system configured Epic versus Epic’s MyChart not being able to support uploaded documents.  I do love how Stacy called this a “feature” of Epic’s MyChart.  The reality is that for some health systems, this is a feature that they want.  They haven’t figured out the right workflow for patients to be able to upload documents to MyChart.  Turning off that option is actually a feature even though Stacy likely said it quite sarcastically.

It makes sense why a patient, in this case Stacy, didn’t have knowledge about how the EHR was implemented.  All she really knew is she was using MyChart and she couldn’t do what she needed to do as a patient.  It’s not for patients to understand the nuances of who is to blame for a poor patient experience.

Unfortunately, this is the reality of being an EHR vendor.  You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make the drink.  Epic can lead a user to a feature, but they can’t force them to use it.  Not listening to customers is the biggest way to ruin your company.

What does this mean for Hurt?  Unfortunately, she likely doesn’t have many outlets.  She needs to work with her health system to help them understand why it’s a poor patient experience and should be changed.  How many patients have been successful at this type of influence over a health system?  Probably not many.

I was intrigued by a picture that Stephanie Lahr, MD, CIO at Monument Health posted at the Epic UGM (user conference) that’s happening this week.

Her team and her were able to achieve Gold Stars Level 8 status with Epic. This seems to be an interesting move by Epic to encourage Epic users to make use of all the Epic functionality. Then, based on their usage they’re awarded with a certain Gold Star level. It kind of reminds me of the EMRAM stage 7 from HIMSS that many healthcare organizations like to tout. Although, having it just focused on Epic usage is powerful at connecting healthcare organizations that are at certain usage levels.

Of course, Hurt’s tweet did also prompt a number of laughter inducing replies to the health system not enabling Epic MyChart to do the function she needed as a patient.

And then there was this tweet which shows the caring side of healthcare (albeit, also illustrating the problem).

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John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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