The Acquired Podcast (Acquired | About) is well known for its thorough evaluations of large businesses and complete histories of how they came to dominate their markets. Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal bring a VC perspective to how to evaluate companies, markets, and the business decisions that have been made along the way.
Anyone with an interest in healthcare informatics, or the digital health space, should listed to the episode on Epic (Epic Systems (MyChart): The Complete History and Strategy). Clocking in at almost 4 hours, this is a comprehensive history of Epic, electronic health records, meaningful use, and the current EHR landscape. For me, a few bullets stood out among the great content.
- Epic’s primary customer (and this should be a key learning for startups planning B2B sales to health care providers) is the CFO, CEO, and CIO of the health system.
- Epic has never lost a customer.
- Meaningful use locked in incumbent EHR vendors, and as the higher cost, higher quality vendor, Epic grew into the dominant player.
- Given its market breadth and expansion, margins are lower than one would expect, and what Epic could charge.
- Ben and David compare Epic and its culture to Microsoft, and make the very strong case that Epic is the OS for healthcare in the US. I’ve thought about this a lot since listening to the podcast, and more and more this makes sense. It is the unavoidable software that makes healthcare go at the provider level for most large medical centers.
- Extending this analogy, I think Epic is a combination of Microsoft (enterprise platform + safe choice) and Apple (walled garden + want to own the customer experience in a very controlled way).
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