I have four pages of itemized problems with Epic that I plan to submit to Judith Faulkner when I retire. I've been involved in two separate Epic implementations over 15 years and it has not improved. I now work for an employer where we have "Care Everywhere" that allows us limited access to other local healthcare Epic systems. Sounds great, right? And it's been a goal of Meaningful Use to have interoperability. But the other system's Epic is so completely different from ours you would think it's a different program. No one is ever a master in Epic because so there are so many layers of useless, irrelevant information and we get only the most basic "training" every time there's an "upgrade". Epic designs products for specialties but the product is so expensive that most physician groups and hospitals purchase only the basic service so we spend a lot of time in workarounds trying to get Epic to do what we need it to do. Trying to validate data for PQRS demonstrated how ineffective, cumbersome, and illogical it is to navigate and make Epic a useful EHR and practice management system.
Epic experience is valuable to employers because it takes so much time and energy to get someone trained.
Whether many of these problems are really Epic's issue or the administrators' issue is anyone's guess. I still hold Epic accountable because if it was an intuitive and logical system it wouldn't matter how poorly we are trained.
Epic is like driving from Portland to Seattle on side roads. You can get there but it takes a long time and many stops at red lights and some wrong turns. eClinicalWorks is like using the freeway.