My wife is a hospital pharmacist. Cerner is a poular EMR system, is ~#2 in the market (behind Epic). These systems are ridiculously difficult to change between (everyone from your front-check-in desk to every surgeon who has privileges needs to be trained on how the new system works in addition to the technical problems with ETL'ing all your data over, and each hospital has an enormous amount of customization done to their workflows that has to be ported over to the new system)- she's done that twice at two different places and it was a huge, process, 18 months minimum. So these EMR's have an enormous amount of lock-in.
The punchline is, in 2022 Oracle purchased Cerner, renamed it Oracle Health, and started accelerating the process of enshittifying it. I have to tip my hat to them, it's like their BizDev team found a market segment that had as much lock-in as SQL databases do, and are now trying to replicate all the evil tricks they learned from that in another market segment. Because what are hospitals but giant bags of money to be drained so Larry Ellison can buy another yacht?
True, but with one exception that I saw (Memorial Sloan Kettering), every EMR that isn’t Epic is a steaming pile. And I think MSK is switching.
Epic is my wife's favorite, for sure. Both of the switch-overs she was involved in were to Epic. They also cost more than the others.
One thing I have learned in my two decades of SWE'ing is how vitally important active competition is. One of the major competitors voluntarily taking themselves out of the competition so it can be sucked dry of value always seems to be good news for the market share, dominance, and profitability of the #1 in the market, and bad news for everyone's customers.
As a health consumer, Epic is so dang slow that I wonder what it's like for medical professionals.