The Epic press tour continues, as Freakonomics interviewed CEO Judy Faulkner last week in “What Makes Judy Run”.

Freakonomics is certainly a household name, though I don’t follow the show closely. I had hoped they might push Epic’s CEO a bit. Overall, it lacked the unique financial analysis we got out of the Acquired episode and mostly trotted out familiar talking points and company lore.

That said, a few moments stood out. When Dubner relayed a question from Zeke Emanuel about why Epic inhibits independent app development, Faulkner responded:

DUBNER: Here’s a question that was passed along from Zeke Emanuel, who’s been on our show a few times. Oncologist and medical ethicist and policymaker. He says, why does she — meaning, you — inhibit independent app development, and easy access to the platform? She plays favorites that inhibit innovation.

FAULKNER: Ok, I’ll try to answer that. We certainly don’t inhibit anyone from developing whatever they want. So we have a lot of apps out there. We have more A.P.I.s — you’re familiar with an A.P.I.? — more A.P.I.s than any other vendor. So we try to say, here’s data, folks. You need to get permission from the healthcare organization, because it’s not our data. We write the code to allow the data to go out to the app, but we don’t give the permission because it’s University of Wisconsin’s data or it’s Cleveland Clinic’s data. It’s not our data.

Faulkner is not wrong that Epic has by sheer count the most APIs. But that metric alone does not a platform make. It’s a great distillation of how Epic conflates effort with outcomes. Developer experience certainly has some correlation with pure availability of inputs and outputs, but not all integrations are created equal. What makes a developer experience is everything that surrounds the API: documentation, tooling, pricing, and predictable rules of engagement.

Faulkner is right that it’s not Epic’s data (and Epic has consistently been strong in their perspective there compared with other EHRs and point solutions). But data ownership isn’t the bottleneck for them. Permission is a necessary condition for interoperability, not a sufficient one. Even after permission is granted, the feasible action space is still bounded by Epic’s (or any system of record’s) product design. There are still a variety of workflows that are at best opaque and at worst unaccomplishable for third parties, given available inputs and outputs.

If the product constrains what developers can do with the data once permission is granted, then the ‘it’s not our data’ framing (deliberately or not) answers the wrong question. That’s perhaps fine for a friendly interview, but is perhaps dangerous for the company in this era, given information blocking and antitrust tensions.

Speaking of which, the show did tackle that topic, albeit briefly: