Watch your doctor doing his own "data entry" next time. First, he'll spin away from you on his stool. Then touch a keyboard with his boogerhooks to re-log-in.

Watch your doctor doing his own "data entry" next time. First, he'll spin away from you on his stool. Then touch a keyboard with his boogerhooks to re-log-in. (A shared KEYBOARD in a room of transient often-sick people ... did you ever do the biology experiment in high school where you swab surfaces and inoculate a petri dish? The keyboards came out worse than the toilet seats.) Then he'll mouse around on a bunch of screens showing inconsistent or at the least confusingly presented data (listing, for example, all medications you've ever been prescribed with no obvious way to highlight which ones are current). Finally he'll find the right text box for the notes. As your doctor types in this text box, various auto-completes will come through. Your doctor will then choose from these auto-complete options, which generally make a mockery of the English language and basic grammatical agreement (gender pronouns, etc.). The idea that Epic has empowered, or even in any benign way nudged, doctors to begin doing as good a job of data entry as they once did of dictation and charting is just complete hooey. I have also personally had a physician using Epic Hyperspace enter an incorrect immunization for my then months-old child. This doctor in fact had the correct immunization schedule for children memorized and could have written it out longhand perfectly. But it wasn't until the next visit that they detected the out-of-order sequencing of the immunization series. This was perhaps not the fault of Epic, exactly, but was certainly mediated through Epic Hyperspace and it did absolutely nothing to prevent, flag, or otherwise mitigate this completely detectable, violation-of-deterministic-formula situation. (Everyone was fine and no harm ... this time.) Way off the original topic, here, but let's just say regarding Epic -- whatever it is that's driving adoption of that system is not naively comprehensible to those of us coming from tech/software. It's not quality, cost, UI/UX, safety/accuracy, interoperability, standards, network effect, viral effect, or the rest. Yet, whatever Epic is doing (or whatever esoteric motive their buyers have), it seems to be turning out well for Epic. So attempting a tie-back to the OP -- it's not clear that long-termism of a business necessarily has any salutary effects on the rest of the world.