Hey let's revisit that "poor Eloi have to work remotely until January" article. Hey anybody besides me and OftenBen know Epic? Epic is the 800lb gorilla of EHRs, or "Electronic Health Records" or "thing that HIPAA actually created" because while y'all think HIPAA means you can sue your doctor for whispering your social security number into the philodendron it actually stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. What that means, fundamentally, is that every hospital is required by law to figure out how to exchange records with each other in a non-shitty way. Can I show you something? This is an electrical outlet. More specifically, it's ten electrical outlets. Yep. 49 cents each. How 'bout a hospital-grade electrical outlet? That green dot will cost you an extra $5.74. In other words, hospital-grade shit is hella more expensive, twelve times as expensive in this particular instance. So while any choad with a computer science degree could probably build a medical records portability system, building one that's HIPAA-compliant will cost you billions. Alberta spent $459m to give its 109,000 employees a login, which comes in at a mere $4200 a seat. Note that EPIC does not improve your healthcare. What it does is standardize the way in which your insurance is billed. And again, Alberta (to use an example) spent 5% of their $21b budget on middleware. This allows them to check boxes for stuff done to launch bills for insurance to deny. We're way the fuck too poor for EPIC. We've managed to hornswaggle logins for a couple of the hospitals we work with so we can check on our patients without bugging charge nurses and that's a frickin' victory at $4200/seat. We have two ghetto-fabulous EHRs of our own which are highly specialized and run by tiny outfits and they cost us about $5k a year for six seats. All so that United Health could send us a $0.02 check for a lidocaine injection and Molina could reject some poor kid's TDAP vaccine because "state law prohibits dispensing more than three vaccines per day." Medical biller - the only career where you're unsure who hates you more - yourself or the people you work with. But hey, back to EPIC: 80% of 10,000 employees have offices of their own. Turns out $2.8b a year in revenue brings in a lot of perqs other than whimsy. Note that none of these mutherfuckers are actually supporting hospitals right now because that goes out to third-party consultancies that if you're huge you just fucking buy. $2.8b a year and it just makes the leaks easier. Alberta paid $459m for 109,000 seats of a software platform that will let any one of them or any of their friends leak every single medical record in Alberta. School officials didn’t respond to requests for comment. The money Ms. Bucolo and her husband had saved for a down payment on a house will now pay for health insurance instead. They are living with her in-laws to conserve cash and have help with their two children. Despite the prospect of prolonged unemployment, she said, quitting her job “was the right decision.”This summer, executives at health-care-technology firm Epic Systems announced a plan: Most of the 9,500 employees at its 1,000-acre campus in Wisconsin would be expected back in the office in September.
Epic’s shift highlights the complexities confronting many big businesses. The company makes widely used electronic medical software and says it is providing an essential service in a pandemic. At its Verona, Wis., campus, workers are spread across 28 buildings and roughly 80% of employees have offices with doors that close, making it easier to socially distance, Epic’s Mr. Rehm said. And plenty of employees have continued showing up at the office; on some days, more than 4,000 employees have voluntarily been on-site, he said.
As her employer, the Phoenix Country Day School, was crafting its fall plans, she was told it needed “all hands on deck,” she said. She drafted proposals for working remotely and which tasks would need to be reassigned. School officials denied her requests, she said, and she resigned in July. She is currently looking for freelance work.