Google, Epic ink deal to migrate hospital EHRs to the cloud to ramp up use of AI

The problem with Epic is that they seem to refuse to deal with their technical debt. As far as I know, it&#x27;s still some janky visualbasic UI with a M&#x2F;UMPS backend (well w&#x2F; a modernization wrapper). And why change because hospital CIOs are willing to approve contracts worth hundreds of millions (and their competitors are even worse)<p>Maybe it all works...however slowly... but pulling data out of what is effectively a bunch of antiquated and super siloed-bins seems overly labor intensive and cost ineffective.<p>The other announcement was that they were doing to do a partnership with Apple, but sounded like the task of actually making a modern native client on MacOS was beyond their technical skill...(their iOS app efforts are...not pretty...)

I&#x27;m actually less concerned with the privacy implications (which are concerning) than with the idea of more &quot;AI&quot; in healthcare. AI is a shiny object that does not solve any of the most urgent problems in healthcare, and almost certainly distracts from them, while all the &quot;quick wins&quot; are going to be the usual automation of what should be personal interactions, making it worse for everyone that is not the &quot;average&quot; customer. AI investment in healthcare is for the benefit of the AI providers only. It is not going to benefit patients, certainly not vs other ways the money could be spent (more staff, more beds)

note that they already supported this migration capability to AWS and Azure.<p>example: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloudblogs.microsoft.com&#x2F;industry-blog&#x2F;microsoft-in-business&#x2F;business-transformation&#x2F;2022&#x2F;03&#x2F;25&#x2F;epic-on-azure-gaining-rapid-momentum&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloudblogs.microsoft.com&#x2F;industry-blog&#x2F;microsoft-in-...</a>

I don&#x27;t think hospitals really want to run their own datacenters so this makes a lot of sense especially for the new AI medical applications.

We&#x27;ll see how this goes. Maybe a win for some things, like possibly better security standards enforcement to protect against ransomware.

The press release is of course nearly devoid of interesting facts<p>The &quot;We will use AI&quot; and that will be great. Is highly annoying.<p>M&#x2F;UMPS and Visual Basic 6 running on Google Cloud. That might be the first time for that stack. Maybe.<p>They used to run off of a proprietary or at least legacy database as well. I wonder if they still are.<p>It will be interesting to integrate that to conform with BigQuery. Or perhaps they will export all the data to a sane store first.<p>Epic is notorious for not integrating with any other system. Or at least they were a decade ago.

The use of “AI” here is style without substance. The thing that jumps out at me is “Epic workloads” on Google cloud, which sounds a lot like generating reports on cloud rather than on prem(?).

Chromebooks at the hospitals?

Two companies I&#x27;d absolutely not want within miles of my health records.

The odds are never in our favor!

Hopefully the law will intervene here. We should have a right to not have our medical data ingested by Google, and Google&#x27;s already gotten in trouble for this in the UK.<p>We really need the government to outright forbid Google from healthcare at this point.