[cordite]

Epic is often compared to Salesforce, which is to say even if there is a better localized app for a specialty (of which there are many in healthcare), the next questions are: How do integrate this into the other apps, how does it get into the record, how can people in other specialties receive information downstream to act appropriately from medical side to billing side. Then there's the last non-app part, what is the cost structure, what are the hardware requirements, who's going to watch it when it goes down, what disaster recovery strategies are available, what downtime-protocols should be followed when it goes down and up, who can I call when there's a problem I need fixed now, and finally who out there is already using it and demonstrated success with it?

I used to work at Epic and have seen in the field the requirements the immediate people need as I listed above. Billing driven documentation is an accurate way to label it. The software is implemented to maximize revenue for the hospitals and organizations, without reliable targeted information coverage agencies won't pay for what was supposedly done. There are whole teams in health care and applications from suites like Epic for such teams just for refining billing. A physician knows what they are ordering for a patient, a temp worker downstream refining billing data doesn't, therefore prioritizing accurate data from the physician will result in better likelihood of obtaining claims downstream. That however competes with the immediate need of the patient.

[odyssey7]

> There are whole teams in health care and applications from suites like Epic ... just for refining billing.

To anyone interested in AI in healthcare, I suspect that datasets of procedure and diagnosis billing codes could be some of the most accurate and immediately usable of their size.