[10] The company also has offices in Bristol, UK; 's-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands; Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; Helsinki, Finland; Melbourne, Australia; Singapore; Trondheim, Norway; and Søborg, Denmark.
MyChart is used by patients to access doctors’ records, schedule appointments, review and re-fill medications, message their care team, and for billing purposes.
[16] By 2018, the total expenses for the project were $1.6 billion, with payments for the software itself amounting to less than $100 million and the majority of the costs caused by lost patient revenues, tech support and other implementation work.
[18] Epic also offers cloud hosting for customers that do not wish to maintain their own servers;[19] and short-term optimization and implementation consultants through their wholly-owned subsidiary Boost, Inc.[citation needed] The company's competitors include Cerner, MEDITECH, Allscripts, athenahealth, and units of IBM, McKesson, and Siemens.
[25] Robert Kuttner writes for The American Prospect that Epic's market dominance is driven by its software's ability to maximize profits for hospitals by facilitating upcoding, a form of healthcare fraud.
[26] Kuttner also reports that providers are faced with time-consuming training, alert fatigue, and mistakes stemming from copying and pasting from previous notes, ultimately leading to burnout and early retirements.
[28] A 2014 article in The New York Times interviews two doctors who said that their Epic systems would not allow them to share data with users of competitors' software in a way that will satisfy the Meaningful Use requirements of the HITECH Act.
[28] However, after Congressional hearings, Epic and other major software vendors announced that they would suspend per-transaction sharing fees.
[31] The report also cited other research showing that Epic's implementation in the Kaiser Permanente system led to efficiency losses.
[41] Problems with the clinical-records system, which were said to have compromised the "ability to report, highlight and take action on data" and to prescribe medication properly, were held to be contributory factors in the organization's sudden failure.
[42] In February 2016, digitalhealth.net reported that Clare Marx, president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England and member of the NHS National Information Board, found that at the time of implementation, "staff, patients and management rapidly and catastrophically lost confidence in the system.
"[43] In 2016, Danish health authorities spent 2.8 billion DKK on the implementation of Epic in 18 hospitals in a region with 2.8 million residents.
The complaint was signed by 619 doctors, the majority of whom were employees of the Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa (HUS) and users of Apotti.
[50] Luzerner Kantonsspital (today LUKS Gruppe) was the first hospital in Switzerland to introduce Epic in any German speaking country worldwide in September 2019.
After approximately two months, the public broadcaster NRK reported that around 25% of the doctors at the region's main hospital considered quitting their job, and that 40% were experiencing stress related health issues due to the new IT system.
[52] Due to the chaos ensuing the introduction, including 16.000 letters not being sent to patients, the Norwegian CEO of the Helseplattformen IT project, Torbjørg Vanvik, had her employment ended by the board.
[53] Unexpected cost increases forced the authorities to decrease efforts in other areas, such as a planned initiative on mental health.
"[61] Criticism revolved in particular around the fact that employees were being ordered back to preserve the company "culture," despite CEO Judy Faulkner's admission that work was getting done remotely.