A Look at Epic Culture and Interoperability with Brendan Keeler – Part 1

In the over 1000 healthcare IT video interviews we’ve done on Healthcare IT Today, there’s some people where 20-30 minutes just doesn’t feel long enough.  You wish you had a couple hours to talk with them and go really deep on a number of different topics.  That feeling led to an idea.  What if we tried a 2 hour interview where we dive deep into a topic and the person’s history and experience in healthcare IT?

Once I had the idea, I knew the perfect person to try out this long form interview: Brendan Keeler, Interoperability Practice Lead at HTD Health.  2 hours and 17 minutes later with no breaks or cuts, I knew the Healthcare IT Today was going to love learning from Brendan.

For those not familiar with Brendan, outside of his work at HTD Health, he also writes a very popular and well written substack at healthapiguy.substack.com and recently created an Epic Alumni community on Slack (Contact him if you used to work at Epic and would like to join).  Brendan started working at Epic back in 2012 and worked there for almost 6 years.  He then went on to work at Redox doing interoperability and then followed that up working with Jonathan Bush at Zus Health.  Since then he’s worked at Flexpa and advised multiple health IT companies before landing his current job at HTD Health where he helps health IT companies with their interoperability needs.

Needless to say, Brendan has a unique background and deep understanding of healthcare interoperability that made for a great conversation.  Plus, we even do some fun sidebars like Brendan’s love of weddings and karaoke.  To make the conversation a little more bite sized, we’ve broken it up into 3 parts.

In part 1 of the series, we start by talking about Brendan’s time working at Epic.  He shares some of the unique aspects of Epic’s company culture, characterized by high expectations, hard work, and a focus on customer needs.  Plus, he shares some of the unique international experience he had at Epic.

We then switch gears to talk about how Brendan got into interoperability and the evolution of interoperability from financial data (claims and eligibility) to clinical data.  He talks about the difference in intraoperability and interoperability as he sees it and how fundamentally interoperability is automating a workflow.  We talk about some of the current challenges and opportunities to improve existing interoperability systems including a disussion of redundancy in claims processing.  Plus, we can’t talk interoperability without some discussion of government regulation and agencies like ASTP (Formerly known as ONC) and CMS as we continue to digitize the sharing of health data.

Switching back to Epic, Brendan shares some of what it was like to work for a leader like Judy Faulkner, Founder and CEO of Epic.  He talks about why he thinks Epic has been so successful including things like their unique approach to evaluating and onboarding talent.  Plus, you’re going to want to hear the amazing poop story from the Epic All Hands staff meeting.

There’s a lot more, but hopefully that gives you a flavor for what you’ll learn from Brendan in part 1 of our 3 part interview series.  And be sure to check back each week for part 2 and part 3.

Learn more about HTD Health: https://htdhealth.com/

Listen and subscribe to the Healthcare IT Today Interviews Podcast to hear all the latest insights from experts in healthcare IT.

And for an exclusive look at our top stories, subscribe to our newsletter and YouTube.

Tell us what you think. Contact us here or on Twitter at @hcitoday. And if you’re interested in advertising with us, check out our various advertising packages and request our Media Kit.