Epic Systems Hiring Practices and Inexperience

It appears that the big G still has not indexed this site, so I will have to continually add new posts until it gets indexed. I know that once the site is indexed, many employees at Epic will receive automatic alerts to read it.

I'll talk a little about Epic's hiring practice in this post. Everyone knows they tend to hire people straight out of college without any experience. How exactly do they get away with it? First, the interview process is long and tedious. Expect it to take at least two months and you will jump through many hoops. You will have to provide college transcripts and high school ACT and SAT scores. You will have to take SAT type tests, as well as speed challenge tests and very in-depth personality tests. It's difficult to find adults who have the time to go through all of these hoops when they probably already are busy with a current job and their families.

I had a friend who went through all of this, plus four interviews only to ultimately get rejected from Epic after an interview with Judy. I'm surprised she even interviewed him, but it must have been because he was applying for an HR position. He told me Judy asked him a question such as "What do you do with an employee who has demonstrated a weakness in a same area on a few occasions?" He had a straight out of the book response saying that you should provide more training to the employee to focus on those areas of weakness. Judy said that you should just fire them.

I think the speed test is the best way for Epic to eliminate older people. It's a 10 question math test, with simple to moderately challenging problems and you have 2 minutes to finish. I was told nobody ever correctly answered all 10, but I'm pretty sure I answered the first 9 right and took a stab at 10, which amazed HR at the time.

These are still somewhat minor grievances with their hiring process. I'm sure there have been some candidates they've eliminated simply because they are not fresh out of college. It's impossible to know because I haven't seen all the resumes they receive. I do know plenty of top-notch people get rejected. I tried referring some older friends who had close to 4.0 GPAs and amazing work experience only to see them rejected without ever receiving a single interview. I think there's some illegal activities that goes on behind the scenes of HR, but I have no proof.

The only little thing I do know is that they will essentially figure out how old you are in a slightly discriminatory way. It's required that you give out your graduating year from college. Plus one of the first questions they ask during the phone screen is whether you went from high school straight to college. I know they still ask this question to this day because my officemate asked it all the time when he did phone screens. This type of question seems illegal in my mind because it has nothing to do with how someone will perform at their job. It's clearly used to determine if they took years off before college and possibly coming to the conclusion that they might be a "slacker" for doing so.

A lot of software companies tend to hire young, so what's the big deal? The big deal is that this is extremely complicated healthcare software. It's somewhat easy for the younger crowd to learn the software as compared to older adults, but quite difficult to actually provide advice on how it should be setup. This is especially true of all clinical apps. Customers consistently tell Epic year after year that they are too young and inexperienced, and while Judy says she want to improve this area, that is simply not true. Not based on the fact that they still fire so many people and replace them with younger faces.

I was on the outpatient app and my first install I was teamed up with a manager (AM as in application manager in Epic speak) who had never done an install before. Neither of us had any experience with outpatient clinic workflows, leading design and validation sessions, or providing any sort of advice. I can't even count how many times we were both asked what our recommendation was, and we would either have to slightly BS or would tell them we would need to research and get back to them. I can attest that this delayed our project and caused many problems throughout. I just couldn't believe at the time that Epic would staff an entire project with people who had no experience. Usually the AMs do have experience, but its not a guarantee they have been through an entire install before.

This is what lead to many late nights at Epic Systems for me because I was not only learning the software, but I was reading tons of information just to learn how clinics actually operate on a day-to-day basis. While the training provided at Epic is quite good, I learned a lot more from my customer. I was essentially taught by my customer how a clinic operates.

I often felt like I was contributing to some of the high costs in healthcare while working at Epic. While Judy stresses that we not nickel and dime our customers, which is a good philoshopy, budgets still get overblown. Almost every project would go overbudget and miss deadlines. This is pretty common throughout the industry even with Epic's competitors though. Epic just tends to be less over budget than others and that's alright with the clients. Judy banks on the fact that young, enthusiastic individuals can install systems faster than older, experienced people. Epic's had so much success that it's hard to deny it's worked. That doesn't mean that it will always work. I think it's likely worked for Epic because as you may have heard they are picky on who they let become a customer. They only work with organizations that have very established and large IT departments, so you know there's much less risk in the project failing.

My advice to Epic is that they should hold on to their experienced people. Like I mentioned in the first post, the software itself is becoming extremely complicated and you will need to keep your experienced people for that reason alone. Plus why do you make every new customer suffer through inexperienced implementations? It's just silly and the systems never get setup correctly. Some systems are actually really well implemented and use all of Epic's functionality. On the other hand some are very poorly implemented because of inexperience and physicians literally hate the software and will complain to the highest levels.

But this is also how Epic makes their money as they provide Upgrade Assistance with their project managers and make more money. This is often to fix things setup poorly during implementation or to improve workflows that were never programmed correctly by developers in the first place.

I would have to say that looking back on Epic they are just are broken as the healthcare industry itself. It still boggles my mind they are that they are best for large-scale implementations. I can easily see one of the smaller companies over-taking Epic in terms of offering a better product. But healthcare organizations will not want to invest in a new system anytime soon, so Epic will always be around.