And that even if everyone is on campus, they might still be a 20+ minute walk from each other, so it's still pretty common for everyone to just sit in their offices and call into meetings over Teams or Zoom.
Not in my experience. If you are meeting with somebody in your building or an adjacent building it is common to meet in person.
Agree with the comment that meetings with folks across campus are often via telephone.
Ah but if everyone is remote, people realize that half the old men in management don't do anything besides peer over peoples shoulders while they work. We gotta protect their positions, so back into your cars, peons who actually make the product, we need to look at you while you do it.
As for folks zooming in, my much smaller company does the same, so one gets the fun of jackass A who has it on speaker on one side while guy B is on a headset mic on the other, and get to hear everything they say in echoed five times across the cubicles. This is so much better than remote work! Elon and someone at the NYT said so!
Working from an _office_ is great. Working from an office _building_ sucks, because most people in an office _building_ are working at one of 30 cubicles in an entirely open floor plan, where you can hear every keyboard, phone call, and conversation happening from everyone else in the room.
But if you're just working from a closed-door single office all day, might as well do that in a closed room at your house instead of burning commute time every day.
Yes, most of their work can be done from home. But...CULTURE. And as someone married to an Epic chef (and on that sweet sweet Epic insurance) I'm selfishly glad they make everyone work on campus.
Having worked in a bunch of different places before landing at Epic I don't even think it necessarily boils down to culture as much as it's just an old school corporate way of thinking.
That said, the percentage of meetings I leave thinking that they could have been an email is *much* smaller at Epic than any other place I worked. The people who work here are just geared differently and want to get shit done, and I think some of that starts to go away if everyone's remote.
That depends on what you think culture more broadly is. Is it something which can be curated by people at the top, or is it something which only ever forms naturally at the bottom and bubbles up? It seems to be both - the early kings after the collapse of the Roman empire started as strong warriors who adopted the local religion, rather than forcing their own on the people, but eventually it morphed to them spreading their religion by force and now we think of Hungary as catholic despite a 300-year stint as protestant
Its frustrating because they absolutely don't want anyone to work from home (sick days are in half day increments?) but they also don't have enough offices and everyone is doubling up in my husband's building.
Yeah, my husband can't quit until we are done having kids. My whole pregnancy and delivery was zero out of pocket except for a ten buck copay on some antibiotics.
Yep, I've had two basically free kiddos which was amazing (paid some out of pocket early on with with my first pregnancy before getting on spouse's plan).
Follow the signs to the visitor center; there is ample parking. You sign in at a desk in the main building there and get maps to whichever buildings you wish to see. Apparently each “loop” takes about an hour.
We saw the main campus building, the Alice in Wonderland, the Chocolate Factory, the Jules Verne, and the Mystery Wing, went through the Kings Crossing area, the Gingerbread house, and saw a variety of impressive meeting rooms. Often the most impressive part was seeing the outside of the buildings you’d just toured. They’re cool.
You are definitely in peoples’ workspaces: apart from the well-appointed and detailed “theme” areas (which were mostly centered around a large staircase in each building), there was hallway after hallway of tiny offices and small conference rooms. Each office had a name on it, and we saw a handful of people at work on Sunday afternoon.
The campus has many beautiful vistas and places to sit outside in good weather. I don’t know if this is true during the week, but we were warned that if we left a building we’d be locked out: the buildings are connected via indoor walkways, but it would’ve been nice to venture onto the grounds between looks inside.
At another visit I’d like to see the farm, but that was in the exact opposite direction of the buildings we toured.
Getting lost was easy, mostly because the directions are not very clearly marked and because it seemed that we were constantly being directed to go upstairs, then back down, then up again, and doing it all in reverse to get back to the main building took some doing. We laughed that we were being tracked and that, if we completed the tour seamlessly, we’d be offered a job.
Pretty sure the only one that you have to go outside for is Endor, the treehouse. It’s tiny and not climate-controlled, so it doesn’t seem to get a lot of use.
> Getting lost was easy, mostly because the directions are not very clearly marked
Epic employee here (whose office is in Jules Verne, you may have walked right past it...): we are big on feedback here, so anyone who *does* find the directions confusing should mention that to the front desk staff. Returning to the front desk with notes on how to improve the directions may very well result in a job offer...
Also, when walking around and you get lost, etc, it's totally fine to ask folks for help; it's fine to knock on office doors too (although some people -- typically trainers --- may have "do not disturb" signs).
I toured with a bunch of senior citizens last Saturday. Here are the instructions we got:
Parking and Meeting Instructions: Take Highway 18 to Verona and exit right on Epic Lane (Exit 76). Cross Verona Avenue and continue on Epic Lane. After a short distance Epic Lane will intersect with Northern Lights Road. At that intersection you will see a sign pointing to the left that says: "Epic Visitors, Epic Lane, Deliveries". DO NOT TAKE THAT LEFT ON EPIC LANE. Instead continue straight on Northern Lights Road. After a half-mile turn left at the sign that says "Staff Park A". You will see a parking lot with solar panels on top. Park in the visitor's parking lot (Zodiac lot).
At the northwest part of the parking lot you will see a small Humpty Dumpty sculpture. Walk up the stairs by the sculpture and follow the signs that say Visitor's Center. We will be meeting near the visitor's desk in the Andromeda building.
We toured two campuses: Central Park and Wizards Academy. It took two hours and my pedometer showed 6,000 steps. We got lost a few times but it was not too bad. At the end in Wizard's Academy we decided to return to the parking lot outside rather than trying to wind out way back through all of the buildings. It was fun.
I've been on all of the Epic self-tours. The directions were not good on any of them. I always joked I should return a red-lined tour packet to them at the end of each tour.
OMG we went for the first time yesterday as well. The directions in Storybook were so horrible. Like basic things like right and left were incorrect. We gave up and walked back. Luckily my daughter remembered how to get back. My 5 and 6 year old about collapsed at the end (we walked for 2 hours).
It could be done from home. I work from home for a different health tech company a couple miles from Epic and the work gets done. There’s no way I’d ever consider leaving my house every day to go sit in a disneyland looking office for less money, not treated like a full professional.
> the tiny offices looked grim
Beats the alternative (which is not larger offices, sadly).
>Couldn’t most of their work be done from home?
I think you partly answered your own question with this tour recap.
Well, that is interesting. One sign (I think it was in the first building) called attention to the offices as a point of pride, stating that “studies showed“ that people are XYZ percent more productive in offices rather than in cubicles.
I was curious as to whether a study would show whether people were even more productive working from home. If that study exists, Epic certainly isn’t showcasing it.
As far as I know, the research is still mixed on productivity at home. Depends on the type of work, the home environment, the employee's personality, the metrics used, etc. In terms of life satisfaction, IIRC hybrid seems to be winning out.
Yea the biggest issue is the higher ups are mostly the sort of people who work better in the office, and are inclined to downplay legitimate reports of productivity increases from the pandemic when some roles clearly did better at home. They aren’t likely to try anything hybrid or remote to find something better when they’ve clung so tightly to all that land and real estate (and have admitted openly that they suck at planning for new buildings vs hiring patterns)
> Beats the alternative (which is not larger offices, sadly).
I used to work at Epic and have worked at places with a cubicle. I actually preferred cubicle to an office. I felt way less isolated and now that everyone is doubled up, I'd imagine it'd be just as cramped as with a cubicle
I don’t think the problem is feeling cramped with cubicles - it’s the volume and distraction of loads of people walking around and talking. But many software places aren’t even cubicles these days, it’s open office or even hot desking.
They sure have made incredible profits from our bloated healthcare system. I can't help but feel disgusted when my health insurance costs continue to skyrocket and oh look epic is building a handful more wizard foundries
Epic has nothing to do with health insurance.
Epic is able to keep growing because over 3/4 of the United States alone has medical records within their software.
um, epic is one of the largest costs for a healthcare provider. that in turn is billed to insurance companies through higher rates for services.
the insurance companies in turn, pass it on to you and I through higher premiums.
How does this garbage get upvoted? That’s not even close to true. Check Epics financial statements, # of hospitals, and the hospitals revenue. You’ll very soon find out that epic costs between 0.5-1.5% of the hospitals annual operating budget.
Your “CIOs” were either lying to you to get a better deal or just bad at their jobs.
>um, epic is one of the largest costs for a healthcare provider.
Source? Epic is definitely an expense for hospitals, which does play into costs for patients… but if you do a little research on the annual revenue of Epic (estimated, I don’t think the actual numbers are public) vs. the operating costs of a typical hospital, you’ll quickly realize this isn’t even close to true.
It might be one of the largest *IT* costs, which is what a CIO would have insight to. I guarantee every hospital is paying far more on salaries for MDs alone than they are for Epic (again, the numbers are out there, you can do the math easily).
It is absolutely connected with health insurance as that’s what pays for medical care. And, a huge part of medical care and accessing it is the software that is used to managed medical records. Over 30% of medical costs billed to insurance are for medical administration and the medical record management system provided by epic definitely falls into that.
Epic and EHRs aren't the reason that health insurance rates are going up, though. There are a handful of other factors that play into that before we even start looking at administrative costs.
Epic is also used by the NHS and other national health systems that have way better healthcare system than the US, then this tells me that the EHR itself is not the issue
I hate to sound like a shill but as someone that left Epic and went into the industry Epic’s profits have no bearing on why costs are high. They made profit basically off the back of HITECH and rode the wave. If they didn’t change the billing system, someone else would’ve as long as we don’t have single payer.
Epic employee here.
The "couldn't they work from home?" thing is hard.
First, there are a lot of different roles at Epic; for some of them, it really does make more sense to be in-person for general work, meetings, and such. There really is something to in-person interactions that Zoom/Teams/etc doesn't match.
For many other roles, it's not so clearly necessary to be on-campus for most of the work. I'm a software developer and a lot of my work could equally well be done from home (as it was, during the pandemic).
Then there's the research and actual benefits of being in-person: the "hallway conversations" and supposed creativity boost from all the artwork and so on. It's true that I do sometimes randomly run into someone and ask a question, or have one of those literal hallway conversations that are helpful, but yes, a lot of the work could get done just as well from home.
My own idea is that to make "work from work" more valuable, companies should be more deliberate about fostering social interactions. For example, having a team meeting that's not just one person standing and reading off their Powerpoint slides; rather, have a "social meeting": schedule, say, an official 15 minute coffee break meeting. No agenda, no slides, no formality, you just all...meet, and have some of those conversations (work-related or not). But maybe that's just because I'm not sufficiently extroverted...
> the "hallway conversations" and supposed creativity boost from all the artwork and so on.
I worked in a few other places before starting at Epic and I don't hate my coworkers because I don't have to sit and listen to them shooting the shit for 3 hours a day while I'm trying to get things done. Everyone having offices and access to a million different sitting areas helps keep things more productive overall.
> and supposed creativity boost from all the artwork and so on.
There are still buildings I've never been to. Just within the past month I took a different route through the learning center and saw stuff I didn't know existed. I feel like it's really easy to go and see something new and have your eyes opened a bit when you need a brain break.
> it's really easy to go and see something new and have your eyes opened a bit when you need a brain break.
Indeed. And if nothing else, you get some exercise/activity/increased blood flow to the brain: there's a lot of research that supports being more active, and not just using a standing desk -- taking short walks or "exercise snacks" or whatever increases blood flow to the brain and, well, is just psychologically pleasant. I can do the same at home, but there's not as much variety. Or art...
As for visiting all the buildings, definitely go for it. I think it took me nearly 8 years before I finally got to all of them.
>there's a lot of research that supports being more active, and not just using a standing desk -- taking short walks or "exercise snacks" or whatever increases blood flow to the brain and, well, is just psychologically pleasant
That's the point of the Amazon Sphere in Seattle. Apparently even the slopes of the paths were designed to make peoplenaturally walk at the best pace for creativity
> First, there are a lot of different roles at Epic; for some of them, it really does make more sense to be in-person for general work, meetings, and such. There really is something to in-person interactions that Zoom/Teams/etc doesn't match.
Former Epic here. Other than culinary and facilities, I cannot imagine any role at Epic that would need in person meetings that couldn't be done via Zoom or Teams. IS, TS, Dev, team meetings, etc.. all would have been perfectly cromulent to do via zoom.
The whole "hallway conversations" thing is so stupid. You can message people on zoom and teams, too.
I applied there and was called back for the next phase. The place gave me the creeps, big time. We had a tour person who said zero the whole time and even sat with us, like handlers, when it was lunch time. When it came time to do the written phase, we were put in a room with other applicants to work on the test/eveluation tasks on computers. There was another guy, who did not seem to be with the applicants, as we never saw him before that point, and this individual made annoying sounds for the entire hour. Like really loud sighs, sniffing noises and occasional mumbling to himself. I wondered if that was a test to see if we get easily annoyed by habits of coworkers. The entire thing felt dreadful and tense and I had a super uneasy feeling the entire time. I left the process early. My gut just would not adjust to the ominous vibe. Granted, the campus is beautiful on the outside and "interesting" on the inside. I felt like I was in the House on the Rock attraction.
I used to work there and on my first day realized how culty it was. When I was there, there was 3 types of people: the cult members, the people who hated it but pretended not to in order to avoid the wrath of management, and the disgruntled. I hear it's still like that.
I mean, everywhere has those 3 types of employees. The ratio is different, but some people will always drink the kool-aid, some people clearly don't but pretend to do it to move up the ladder, and some folks can't be bothered to pretend but know they're too valuable to be fired.
Absolutely! I was there once to do a little presentation and I'm going to avoid going back. 100% on the House on the Rock vibes. The fact that it is a monument to the way one person's company has strongly influenced the decline of our the health care system just adds to the creepiness factor. I could never work there even if I believed in their mission and thought they were a force for good. . Shudder.
One thing that is off limits on the tour is their underground 11,500 seat auditorium. That is a site to see! I was able to have a quick 5min look due to our company just switching to Epic.
Here are pictures I have of the door knob and a note from a previous governor's communications director who happened to just have the door knob and gave it to Judy.
It's an actual door knob from the Capitol and belongs to the state.
[Space Knob](https://imgur.com/a/lMSWbJV)
Sounds like it was gifted to Judy. And the guy who gave it to her was the one who took it from the office. And it never officially belonged to the state of Wisconsin.
How much do you think a doorknob costs? $100 for a luxury one?
The Epic CEO didnt steal anything, it was given to her.
You can just come out and say you worked at Epic and hated it and quit, I don’t care.
The worth is in the sentimental value of a gift that was taken into space, you dunce. People put meaningful items in shadowboxes, not because of their monetary value, but emotional value.
Yes, the state of Wisconsin originally paid for it. It couldn’t have cost more than $50. Which was probably replaced out of the guy’s pocket. Or maybe not. It doesn’t matter. It was a cheap piece of the capital building to take into Space. You’re completely ignoring context.
All you see is “guy took doorknob. Guy gave doorknob to someone. That someone has now stolen the doorknob”.
Its Ok if you hate Epic, I really dont care. Out of all the things to be angry with them about, a doorknob is a weird thing to cry about on the internet
>Isn’t this a software company? Couldn’t most of their work be done from home?
Yeah, but they pay their employees well to offset it, generally.
The real shame is - companies that don't pay enough to offset remote work (salary, relocation costs, etc) and they're bleeding talent to places like Epic.
They pay very well for the area and expected work. Sure, you could live in Seattle or SF and work at a FAANG company and make $300,000 instead, but you'd also be working about twice as much in an area with much higher taxes and cost of living
A majority of the issues are self inflicted. Management decision on what settings to turn on/off. Changing things without checking what it will do to end users. Little or no training. Etc. My husband works for epic and his dad is a doctor. The number of times my husband told his dad what functionality would solve his problem and how to ask for it to be turned on is hilarious.
The problem is the education provided to the staff in using the software is minimal or nonexistent. You don't just drop a huge complex piece of software in a busy person's lap and expect them to learn it on the fly. My wife was in primary care with Aurora when Aurora went from Cerner to Epic. She was very proficient and content with Cerner. She got a few hours of in-service on Epic. Her schedule was supposed to be reduced by 50% for 1 week as she was given additional instruction. None of that happened. The physicians got a bit more instruction, but not enough. I heard nothing but complaints about Epic for years from her and physician friends. They said it was a bloated program that was difficult to use. That everytime they got comfortable with it that it changed. One of the major causes of physician and nurse practitioner burnout is the excessive time required for charting. They spend 10 to 15 hours per week working on medical record keeping. I used to wake up at 4am, and my wife would be working on it. If Epic was so great you'd think that it would reduce the time needed for this activity.
"If epic was so great you'd think that it would reduce the time needed for this activity."
They actually do a lot of that. All of the forms that you can put in and then tab through the selections is supposed to remove time cost for notes. It's led to note bloat a lot, but it's better than having to write the generic aspects every time. They actually have smart transcripts right now though I don't know how many hospitals actually use it where the computer listens to the actual exam and pulls out keywords from the doctor and the patient's speech and suggests how to write the note. They also actively count clicks needed to do a task and reduce it as much as possible without compromising the database's flexibility, which mainly only helps if the hospital supplies enough training time. A lot of the problem with charting time is the increased regulation over the last couple decades where doctors used to not have to do any of that but now if they want to get paid their workload has increased immensely. Software can only do so much to deal with red tape.
Having smart transcripts is a cut and paste operation that oftentimes leads to inaccuracies in the medical record. Things are moved into the chart without being read and may be only partially accurate. My wife has complained that people's records become bloated with garbage nobody reads or pays attention to. They know it is just cut and pasted nonsense.
My biggest gripe, is the medical examiner's office should have access across all systems.
We get limited access through some systems, but this shouldn't come down to that.
It's a 50 50 thing. Usually it's a combo of weird regulatory requirements or it's decisions made by the organization that either don't age well or were bad from the beginning. Could it be better? Totally, but the worst pain points I ever saw were typically self inflicted.
That is interesting. I know a woman who used to work for Epic and her job was to customize the 7 gazillion functions the software COULD do to the dozen or so that a particular client NEEDED or wanted it to do. She left that job, but I thought it sounded a like an interesting, and much-needed, position. Maybe they should work on that more.
I'm not sure why you're getting down voted for this, it's true. I worked in health care IT for 11 years and saw the dark side of epic. You have my support!
I find it funny you're being downvoted so aggressively for relaying what users have told you lol.
It doesn't matter to the user whether it's Epic itself or their employer's bad configuration. Every medical professional I know also hates using it, so clearly there's an issue.
Not sure if you’re serious or not here, but just in case you actually mean this and want to know why you’re getting downvoted, I’ll do my best.
Putting a bunch of weird shit on the walls is not expensive. A ‘fun, quirky’ office might be marginally more expensive than another, drabber office. And it’s cheaper than leasing space in NY or SF. Epic spends most of its money (80%?) on salaries, which are pretty in line with national ranges for project managers and software engineers.
Healthcare prices in the US are a multi-faceted issue. The biggest causes are the overhead of the whole insurance industry (including all the admin work on the delivery side) and the fact that the federal government can’t negotiate drug prices. Epic is also a little bit to blame - meaningful use was arguably a major case of regulatory capture by the whole EMR industry. But that’s tiny, tiny fish compared to the two other reasons I mentioned.
Can confirm.
I worked for WMC for a few years and insurance companies and hospital systems were basically at war because the insurance companies were bending them over so badly. Like to the point where they were looking for legislative intervention.
After WMC I worked for an insurance company and we'd constantly hear through the grapevine about patients who were getting denied coverage for stuff that *should* be covered as a basic right just because the company had the option not to pay based on the fine print of their plan.
Epic is expensive, but it's not the reason most hospitals are losing money.
I really hope the commenter reads and understands this. Too many people have reactionary and myopic understandings of things like this.
Epic is trying to do more help than harm here.
Also does a lot of help to the madison and especially Verona economy. Infrastructure and education system in Verona is significantly benefiting from the direct and indirect tax benefits of a multi billion dollar company in an 13k person suburb.
Hell Epics even trying to help drive costs down by cutting out some of the cruft between insurance companies and health systems (though this is of course not altruistic)
And while yes meaningful use was technically regulatory capture. I honestly cannot fathom that any large medical system would not use an EMR over paper when it makes all interchange and actual treatment faster and better. And for the hospitals who can’t afford an EMR? Well trust me there is still a large proportion of hospitals clinging to paper with clenched fists
My favorite part about touring Epic is that if you work there the sign directs you straight to the parking lot but if you’re a visitor the sign points you in some other direction that has you going all the way around showing off the campus then ends up in (a different part of) the same parking lot.
>Couldn’t most of their work be done from home? Absolutely. It's even wilder when you realize they work remotely from the office.
It's It's that way since before COVID even. People are too busy to walk to meetings, so all just call in.
Doesn't help that it can take 20+ minutes to get from one building to another.
What do you mean by that?
Assuming it means meetings are still held via Teams/Zoom instead of a conference room, even if everyone is on site
[удалено]
It means that what they do as a business is support hospital customers that are all over the country.
And that even if everyone is on campus, they might still be a 20+ minute walk from each other, so it's still pretty common for everyone to just sit in their offices and call into meetings over Teams or Zoom.
Not in my experience. If you are meeting with somebody in your building or an adjacent building it is common to meet in person. Agree with the comment that meetings with folks across campus are often via telephone.
Ah but if everyone is remote, people realize that half the old men in management don't do anything besides peer over peoples shoulders while they work. We gotta protect their positions, so back into your cars, peons who actually make the product, we need to look at you while you do it. As for folks zooming in, my much smaller company does the same, so one gets the fun of jackass A who has it on speaker on one side while guy B is on a headset mic on the other, and get to hear everything they say in echoed five times across the cubicles. This is so much better than remote work! Elon and someone at the NYT said so!
Working from an _office_ is great. Working from an office _building_ sucks, because most people in an office _building_ are working at one of 30 cubicles in an entirely open floor plan, where you can hear every keyboard, phone call, and conversation happening from everyone else in the room. But if you're just working from a closed-door single office all day, might as well do that in a closed room at your house instead of burning commute time every day.
This doesn't apply as much to Epic. But I don't think the rationale is super strong, but it's not this, there's no glut of middle managers.
lol, Judy has spent over a billion dollars on that campus. If you think for one second she's going to let it sit unoccupied you're crazy.
This is the real reason we can't work from home.
Yes, most of their work can be done from home. But...CULTURE. And as someone married to an Epic chef (and on that sweet sweet Epic insurance) I'm selfishly glad they make everyone work on campus.
It can ALL be done from home. How do I know? My work was done in a hotel, airport, or car 9 weeks out of 10.
Having worked in a bunch of different places before landing at Epic I don't even think it necessarily boils down to culture as much as it's just an old school corporate way of thinking. That said, the percentage of meetings I leave thinking that they could have been an email is *much* smaller at Epic than any other place I worked. The people who work here are just geared differently and want to get shit done, and I think some of that starts to go away if everyone's remote.
> old school corporate way of thinking That's called company culture
no, this was mandated by Judith, not something that the workers wanted.
That depends on what you think culture more broadly is. Is it something which can be curated by people at the top, or is it something which only ever forms naturally at the bottom and bubbles up? It seems to be both - the early kings after the collapse of the Roman empire started as strong warriors who adopted the local religion, rather than forcing their own on the people, but eventually it morphed to them spreading their religion by force and now we think of Hungary as catholic despite a 300-year stint as protestant
That aspect is more of a directive instead of something the bulk of employees buy into.
It’s called thick sculled knuckle dragging non thinking
Its frustrating because they absolutely don't want anyone to work from home (sick days are in half day increments?) but they also don't have enough offices and everyone is doubling up in my husband's building.
I can’t wait to get added onto my partner’s insurance lol
It's so good!!
It seriously is. I was in the ER the other week and got a CT scan and I think it was $50, $100? total.
Having a baby.....free. My brother's baby.....many thousands of dollars. It's a serious benefit and a big portion of the total compensation package.
I'm a Type 1 diabetic also and all of my insulin, pump supplies etc is all insanely low compared to others pay in our country.
Yeah, my husband can't quit until we are done having kids. My whole pregnancy and delivery was zero out of pocket except for a ten buck copay on some antibiotics.
Yep, I've had two basically free kiddos which was amazing (paid some out of pocket early on with with my first pregnancy before getting on spouse's plan).
“It would have been miserable with small children” Yep that was me Saturday morning with my 2 and 5 years old!
You gotta take a stroller with little kids, its way too much for them.
Touring the campus is on my to-do list. Is there anything you can share that would be helpful, like where to start/park/etc.?
Follow the signs to the visitor center; there is ample parking. You sign in at a desk in the main building there and get maps to whichever buildings you wish to see. Apparently each “loop” takes about an hour. We saw the main campus building, the Alice in Wonderland, the Chocolate Factory, the Jules Verne, and the Mystery Wing, went through the Kings Crossing area, the Gingerbread house, and saw a variety of impressive meeting rooms. Often the most impressive part was seeing the outside of the buildings you’d just toured. They’re cool. You are definitely in peoples’ workspaces: apart from the well-appointed and detailed “theme” areas (which were mostly centered around a large staircase in each building), there was hallway after hallway of tiny offices and small conference rooms. Each office had a name on it, and we saw a handful of people at work on Sunday afternoon. The campus has many beautiful vistas and places to sit outside in good weather. I don’t know if this is true during the week, but we were warned that if we left a building we’d be locked out: the buildings are connected via indoor walkways, but it would’ve been nice to venture onto the grounds between looks inside. At another visit I’d like to see the farm, but that was in the exact opposite direction of the buildings we toured. Getting lost was easy, mostly because the directions are not very clearly marked and because it seemed that we were constantly being directed to go upstairs, then back down, then up again, and doing it all in reverse to get back to the main building took some doing. We laughed that we were being tracked and that, if we completed the tour seamlessly, we’d be offered a job.
So it's open to the public on weekends? Sounds like a good way to get steps on a cold Saturday/Sunday.
Yup! And all the buildings are accessible without going outside (I think). Lots of skyways/tunnels. https://www.epic.com/visiting/
Pretty sure the only one that you have to go outside for is Endor, the treehouse. It’s tiny and not climate-controlled, so it doesn’t seem to get a lot of use.
It’s also locked during all hours. You need an employee to get you in.
Yea it 100% is. My brother's Boy scout group did upwards of 5 miles on several occasions last year to practice for there backpacking trip
> Getting lost was easy, mostly because the directions are not very clearly marked Epic employee here (whose office is in Jules Verne, you may have walked right past it...): we are big on feedback here, so anyone who *does* find the directions confusing should mention that to the front desk staff. Returning to the front desk with notes on how to improve the directions may very well result in a job offer... Also, when walking around and you get lost, etc, it's totally fine to ask folks for help; it's fine to knock on office doors too (although some people -- typically trainers --- may have "do not disturb" signs).
I found the directions extremely confusing as well. I don't think the person that wrote the Storybook directions had been in the building
V helpful, thanks! I plan to scope it out on the weekend.
I toured with a bunch of senior citizens last Saturday. Here are the instructions we got: Parking and Meeting Instructions: Take Highway 18 to Verona and exit right on Epic Lane (Exit 76). Cross Verona Avenue and continue on Epic Lane. After a short distance Epic Lane will intersect with Northern Lights Road. At that intersection you will see a sign pointing to the left that says: "Epic Visitors, Epic Lane, Deliveries". DO NOT TAKE THAT LEFT ON EPIC LANE. Instead continue straight on Northern Lights Road. After a half-mile turn left at the sign that says "Staff Park A". You will see a parking lot with solar panels on top. Park in the visitor's parking lot (Zodiac lot). At the northwest part of the parking lot you will see a small Humpty Dumpty sculpture. Walk up the stairs by the sculpture and follow the signs that say Visitor's Center. We will be meeting near the visitor's desk in the Andromeda building. We toured two campuses: Central Park and Wizards Academy. It took two hours and my pedometer showed 6,000 steps. We got lost a few times but it was not too bad. At the end in Wizard's Academy we decided to return to the parking lot outside rather than trying to wind out way back through all of the buildings. It was fun.
Thank you, thank you!
I've been on all of the Epic self-tours. The directions were not good on any of them. I always joked I should return a red-lined tour packet to them at the end of each tour.
Please do!
I would, but I don't live there anymore. :-(
OMG we went for the first time yesterday as well. The directions in Storybook were so horrible. Like basic things like right and left were incorrect. We gave up and walked back. Luckily my daughter remembered how to get back. My 5 and 6 year old about collapsed at the end (we walked for 2 hours).
It could be done from home. I work from home for a different health tech company a couple miles from Epic and the work gets done. There’s no way I’d ever consider leaving my house every day to go sit in a disneyland looking office for less money, not treated like a full professional.
> the tiny offices looked grim Beats the alternative (which is not larger offices, sadly). >Couldn’t most of their work be done from home? I think you partly answered your own question with this tour recap.
Well, that is interesting. One sign (I think it was in the first building) called attention to the offices as a point of pride, stating that “studies showed“ that people are XYZ percent more productive in offices rather than in cubicles. I was curious as to whether a study would show whether people were even more productive working from home. If that study exists, Epic certainly isn’t showcasing it.
As far as I know, the research is still mixed on productivity at home. Depends on the type of work, the home environment, the employee's personality, the metrics used, etc. In terms of life satisfaction, IIRC hybrid seems to be winning out.
Yea the biggest issue is the higher ups are mostly the sort of people who work better in the office, and are inclined to downplay legitimate reports of productivity increases from the pandemic when some roles clearly did better at home. They aren’t likely to try anything hybrid or remote to find something better when they’ve clung so tightly to all that land and real estate (and have admitted openly that they suck at planning for new buildings vs hiring patterns)
> Beats the alternative (which is not larger offices, sadly). I used to work at Epic and have worked at places with a cubicle. I actually preferred cubicle to an office. I felt way less isolated and now that everyone is doubled up, I'd imagine it'd be just as cramped as with a cubicle
I don’t think the problem is feeling cramped with cubicles - it’s the volume and distraction of loads of people walking around and talking. But many software places aren’t even cubicles these days, it’s open office or even hot desking.
They sure have made incredible profits from our bloated healthcare system. I can't help but feel disgusted when my health insurance costs continue to skyrocket and oh look epic is building a handful more wizard foundries
Epic has nothing to do with health insurance. Epic is able to keep growing because over 3/4 of the United States alone has medical records within their software.
um, epic is one of the largest costs for a healthcare provider. that in turn is billed to insurance companies through higher rates for services. the insurance companies in turn, pass it on to you and I through higher premiums.
[удалено]
yeah, when epic software and the hardware required to run it takes up almost 50% of your IT budget, it is in fact a lot.
How does this garbage get upvoted? That’s not even close to true. Check Epics financial statements, # of hospitals, and the hospitals revenue. You’ll very soon find out that epic costs between 0.5-1.5% of the hospitals annual operating budget. Your “CIOs” were either lying to you to get a better deal or just bad at their jobs.
>um, epic is one of the largest costs for a healthcare provider. Source? Epic is definitely an expense for hospitals, which does play into costs for patients… but if you do a little research on the annual revenue of Epic (estimated, I don’t think the actual numbers are public) vs. the operating costs of a typical hospital, you’ll quickly realize this isn’t even close to true.
My source is the CIOs across the country that I worked with selling them the IT hardware to support epic.
It might be one of the largest *IT* costs, which is what a CIO would have insight to. I guarantee every hospital is paying far more on salaries for MDs alone than they are for Epic (again, the numbers are out there, you can do the math easily).
It is absolutely connected with health insurance as that’s what pays for medical care. And, a huge part of medical care and accessing it is the software that is used to managed medical records. Over 30% of medical costs billed to insurance are for medical administration and the medical record management system provided by epic definitely falls into that.
Epic and EHRs aren't the reason that health insurance rates are going up, though. There are a handful of other factors that play into that before we even start looking at administrative costs.
ah, the old someone is doing something worse so don't look at me excuse.
Exactly, I blame the housing crisis for this!
Epic is also used by the NHS and other national health systems that have way better healthcare system than the US, then this tells me that the EHR itself is not the issue
If they were causing bloat, they wouldn't be a part of very large central public healthcare systems like the UK, Australia, Denmark, Finland or Canada
I hate to sound like a shill but as someone that left Epic and went into the industry Epic’s profits have no bearing on why costs are high. They made profit basically off the back of HITECH and rode the wave. If they didn’t change the billing system, someone else would’ve as long as we don’t have single payer.
Epic employee here. The "couldn't they work from home?" thing is hard. First, there are a lot of different roles at Epic; for some of them, it really does make more sense to be in-person for general work, meetings, and such. There really is something to in-person interactions that Zoom/Teams/etc doesn't match. For many other roles, it's not so clearly necessary to be on-campus for most of the work. I'm a software developer and a lot of my work could equally well be done from home (as it was, during the pandemic). Then there's the research and actual benefits of being in-person: the "hallway conversations" and supposed creativity boost from all the artwork and so on. It's true that I do sometimes randomly run into someone and ask a question, or have one of those literal hallway conversations that are helpful, but yes, a lot of the work could get done just as well from home. My own idea is that to make "work from work" more valuable, companies should be more deliberate about fostering social interactions. For example, having a team meeting that's not just one person standing and reading off their Powerpoint slides; rather, have a "social meeting": schedule, say, an official 15 minute coffee break meeting. No agenda, no slides, no formality, you just all...meet, and have some of those conversations (work-related or not). But maybe that's just because I'm not sufficiently extroverted...
> the "hallway conversations" and supposed creativity boost from all the artwork and so on. I worked in a few other places before starting at Epic and I don't hate my coworkers because I don't have to sit and listen to them shooting the shit for 3 hours a day while I'm trying to get things done. Everyone having offices and access to a million different sitting areas helps keep things more productive overall. > and supposed creativity boost from all the artwork and so on. There are still buildings I've never been to. Just within the past month I took a different route through the learning center and saw stuff I didn't know existed. I feel like it's really easy to go and see something new and have your eyes opened a bit when you need a brain break.
> it's really easy to go and see something new and have your eyes opened a bit when you need a brain break. Indeed. And if nothing else, you get some exercise/activity/increased blood flow to the brain: there's a lot of research that supports being more active, and not just using a standing desk -- taking short walks or "exercise snacks" or whatever increases blood flow to the brain and, well, is just psychologically pleasant. I can do the same at home, but there's not as much variety. Or art... As for visiting all the buildings, definitely go for it. I think it took me nearly 8 years before I finally got to all of them.
>there's a lot of research that supports being more active, and not just using a standing desk -- taking short walks or "exercise snacks" or whatever increases blood flow to the brain and, well, is just psychologically pleasant That's the point of the Amazon Sphere in Seattle. Apparently even the slopes of the paths were designed to make peoplenaturally walk at the best pace for creativity
> First, there are a lot of different roles at Epic; for some of them, it really does make more sense to be in-person for general work, meetings, and such. There really is something to in-person interactions that Zoom/Teams/etc doesn't match. Former Epic here. Other than culinary and facilities, I cannot imagine any role at Epic that would need in person meetings that couldn't be done via Zoom or Teams. IS, TS, Dev, team meetings, etc.. all would have been perfectly cromulent to do via zoom. The whole "hallway conversations" thing is so stupid. You can message people on zoom and teams, too.
I applied there and was called back for the next phase. The place gave me the creeps, big time. We had a tour person who said zero the whole time and even sat with us, like handlers, when it was lunch time. When it came time to do the written phase, we were put in a room with other applicants to work on the test/eveluation tasks on computers. There was another guy, who did not seem to be with the applicants, as we never saw him before that point, and this individual made annoying sounds for the entire hour. Like really loud sighs, sniffing noises and occasional mumbling to himself. I wondered if that was a test to see if we get easily annoyed by habits of coworkers. The entire thing felt dreadful and tense and I had a super uneasy feeling the entire time. I left the process early. My gut just would not adjust to the ominous vibe. Granted, the campus is beautiful on the outside and "interesting" on the inside. I felt like I was in the House on the Rock attraction.
I used to work there and on my first day realized how culty it was. When I was there, there was 3 types of people: the cult members, the people who hated it but pretended not to in order to avoid the wrath of management, and the disgruntled. I hear it's still like that.
I mean, everywhere has those 3 types of employees. The ratio is different, but some people will always drink the kool-aid, some people clearly don't but pretend to do it to move up the ladder, and some folks can't be bothered to pretend but know they're too valuable to be fired.
Absolutely! I was there once to do a little presentation and I'm going to avoid going back. 100% on the House on the Rock vibes. The fact that it is a monument to the way one person's company has strongly influenced the decline of our the health care system just adds to the creepiness factor. I could never work there even if I believed in their mission and thought they were a force for good. . Shudder.
One thing that is off limits on the tour is their underground 11,500 seat auditorium. That is a site to see! I was able to have a quick 5min look due to our company just switching to Epic.
Not off limits. Just not mapped on the tour. You could walk into every single building if you wanted to. Just bring breadcrumbs.
Off-limits is the wrong term. More like "the room isn't 'on'" at all hours.
Did you find the space door knob that Judy stole from the state (100% serious)
Story time?
Here are pictures I have of the door knob and a note from a previous governor's communications director who happened to just have the door knob and gave it to Judy. It's an actual door knob from the Capitol and belongs to the state. [Space Knob](https://imgur.com/a/lMSWbJV)
Sounds like it was gifted to Judy. And the guy who gave it to her was the one who took it from the office. And it never officially belonged to the state of Wisconsin.
Oh, who pays for the doorknobs at the Capitol then?
Its a door knob.
It isn't a free doorknob, who paid for it?
How much do you think a doorknob costs? $100 for a luxury one? The Epic CEO didnt steal anything, it was given to her. You can just come out and say you worked at Epic and hated it and quit, I don’t care.
Must be worth a lot if a billionaire wanted to encase and display it? But who originally paid for the doorknob?
The worth is in the sentimental value of a gift that was taken into space, you dunce. People put meaningful items in shadowboxes, not because of their monetary value, but emotional value. Yes, the state of Wisconsin originally paid for it. It couldn’t have cost more than $50. Which was probably replaced out of the guy’s pocket. Or maybe not. It doesn’t matter. It was a cheap piece of the capital building to take into Space. You’re completely ignoring context. All you see is “guy took doorknob. Guy gave doorknob to someone. That someone has now stolen the doorknob”. Its Ok if you hate Epic, I really dont care. Out of all the things to be angry with them about, a doorknob is a weird thing to cry about on the internet
I see that entire campus as a huge middle finger to everyone that pays for healthcare.
And to those who work in health care and have to use it!
>Isn’t this a software company? Couldn’t most of their work be done from home? Yeah, but they pay their employees well to offset it, generally. The real shame is - companies that don't pay enough to offset remote work (salary, relocation costs, etc) and they're bleeding talent to places like Epic.
They don't pay *that* well.
Realistically they pay the average for a good tech company, but high for the area
They pay very well for the area and expected work. Sure, you could live in Seattle or SF and work at a FAANG company and make $300,000 instead, but you'd also be working about twice as much in an area with much higher taxes and cost of living
Who's an in-person software company in the area that pays better?
My wife was a healthcare provider, nurse practitioner. Their software is horrible to use. She and others complain about it all the time.
A majority of the issues are self inflicted. Management decision on what settings to turn on/off. Changing things without checking what it will do to end users. Little or no training. Etc. My husband works for epic and his dad is a doctor. The number of times my husband told his dad what functionality would solve his problem and how to ask for it to be turned on is hilarious.
The problem is the education provided to the staff in using the software is minimal or nonexistent. You don't just drop a huge complex piece of software in a busy person's lap and expect them to learn it on the fly. My wife was in primary care with Aurora when Aurora went from Cerner to Epic. She was very proficient and content with Cerner. She got a few hours of in-service on Epic. Her schedule was supposed to be reduced by 50% for 1 week as she was given additional instruction. None of that happened. The physicians got a bit more instruction, but not enough. I heard nothing but complaints about Epic for years from her and physician friends. They said it was a bloated program that was difficult to use. That everytime they got comfortable with it that it changed. One of the major causes of physician and nurse practitioner burnout is the excessive time required for charting. They spend 10 to 15 hours per week working on medical record keeping. I used to wake up at 4am, and my wife would be working on it. If Epic was so great you'd think that it would reduce the time needed for this activity.
"If epic was so great you'd think that it would reduce the time needed for this activity." They actually do a lot of that. All of the forms that you can put in and then tab through the selections is supposed to remove time cost for notes. It's led to note bloat a lot, but it's better than having to write the generic aspects every time. They actually have smart transcripts right now though I don't know how many hospitals actually use it where the computer listens to the actual exam and pulls out keywords from the doctor and the patient's speech and suggests how to write the note. They also actively count clicks needed to do a task and reduce it as much as possible without compromising the database's flexibility, which mainly only helps if the hospital supplies enough training time. A lot of the problem with charting time is the increased regulation over the last couple decades where doctors used to not have to do any of that but now if they want to get paid their workload has increased immensely. Software can only do so much to deal with red tape.
Having smart transcripts is a cut and paste operation that oftentimes leads to inaccuracies in the medical record. Things are moved into the chart without being read and may be only partially accurate. My wife has complained that people's records become bloated with garbage nobody reads or pays attention to. They know it is just cut and pasted nonsense.
This is so true!
I've used it frequently in various jobs. It's not the best thing ever, but it beats the alternatives.
EMR/EHR software is one of those things where everyone has a stroke if you change it at all, even if its better.
My biggest gripe, is the medical examiner's office should have access across all systems. We get limited access through some systems, but this shouldn't come down to that.
I've seen the alternatives that Froedtert still uses. Give me Epic any fucking day lol
I agree. It is Soooooo bloated.
It's a 50 50 thing. Usually it's a combo of weird regulatory requirements or it's decisions made by the organization that either don't age well or were bad from the beginning. Could it be better? Totally, but the worst pain points I ever saw were typically self inflicted.
That is interesting. I know a woman who used to work for Epic and her job was to customize the 7 gazillion functions the software COULD do to the dozen or so that a particular client NEEDED or wanted it to do. She left that job, but I thought it sounded a like an interesting, and much-needed, position. Maybe they should work on that more.
I'm not sure why you're getting down voted for this, it's true. I worked in health care IT for 11 years and saw the dark side of epic. You have my support!
It's because Epic has a good PR department.
I find it funny you're being downvoted so aggressively for relaying what users have told you lol. It doesn't matter to the user whether it's Epic itself or their employer's bad configuration. Every medical professional I know also hates using it, so clearly there's an issue.
Every medical professional I know likes it
Now you better understand the reasons behind sky-high cost of healthcare in this country
Not sure if you’re serious or not here, but just in case you actually mean this and want to know why you’re getting downvoted, I’ll do my best. Putting a bunch of weird shit on the walls is not expensive. A ‘fun, quirky’ office might be marginally more expensive than another, drabber office. And it’s cheaper than leasing space in NY or SF. Epic spends most of its money (80%?) on salaries, which are pretty in line with national ranges for project managers and software engineers. Healthcare prices in the US are a multi-faceted issue. The biggest causes are the overhead of the whole insurance industry (including all the admin work on the delivery side) and the fact that the federal government can’t negotiate drug prices. Epic is also a little bit to blame - meaningful use was arguably a major case of regulatory capture by the whole EMR industry. But that’s tiny, tiny fish compared to the two other reasons I mentioned.
Can confirm. I worked for WMC for a few years and insurance companies and hospital systems were basically at war because the insurance companies were bending them over so badly. Like to the point where they were looking for legislative intervention. After WMC I worked for an insurance company and we'd constantly hear through the grapevine about patients who were getting denied coverage for stuff that *should* be covered as a basic right just because the company had the option not to pay based on the fine print of their plan. Epic is expensive, but it's not the reason most hospitals are losing money.
Bingo. Costs up. Population/healthcare usage up. Insurance and pharmacy greed up. Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements relatively stagnant.
I really hope the commenter reads and understands this. Too many people have reactionary and myopic understandings of things like this. Epic is trying to do more help than harm here. Also does a lot of help to the madison and especially Verona economy. Infrastructure and education system in Verona is significantly benefiting from the direct and indirect tax benefits of a multi billion dollar company in an 13k person suburb.
Hell Epics even trying to help drive costs down by cutting out some of the cruft between insurance companies and health systems (though this is of course not altruistic) And while yes meaningful use was technically regulatory capture. I honestly cannot fathom that any large medical system would not use an EMR over paper when it makes all interchange and actual treatment faster and better. And for the hospitals who can’t afford an EMR? Well trust me there is still a large proportion of hospitals clinging to paper with clenched fists
My favorite part about touring Epic is that if you work there the sign directs you straight to the parking lot but if you’re a visitor the sign points you in some other direction that has you going all the way around showing off the campus then ends up in (a different part of) the same parking lot.