{"id":610742,"date":"2026-04-28T06:34:22","date_gmt":"2026-04-28T06:34:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/610742\/"},"modified":"2026-04-28T06:34:22","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T06:34:22","slug":"judy-gets-her-freakonomics-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/610742\/","title":{"rendered":"Judy Gets Her Freakonomics On"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Epic press tour continues, as Freakonomics interviewed CEO Judy Faulkner last week in \u201cWhat Makes Judy Run<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> we got out of the Acquired episode and mostly trotted out familiar talking points and company lore. <\/p>\n

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

DUBNER: Here\u2019s a question that was passed along from Zeke Emanuel, who\u2019s been on our show a few times. Oncologist and medical ethicist and policymaker. He says, why does she \u2014 meaning, you \u2014 inhibit independent app development, and easy access to the platform? She plays favorites that inhibit innovation.<\/p>\n

FAULKNER: Ok, I\u2019ll try to answer that. We certainly don\u2019t inhibit anyone from developing whatever they want. So we have a lot of apps out there. We have more A.P.I.s \u2014 you\u2019re familiar with an A.P.I.? \u2014 more A.P.I.s than any other vendor. So we try to say, here\u2019s data, folks. You need to get permission from the healthcare organization, because it\u2019s not our data. We write the code to allow the data to go out to the app, but we don\u2019t give the permission because it\u2019s University of Wisconsin\u2019s data or it\u2019s Cleveland Clinic\u2019s data. It\u2019s not our data.<\/p>\n

Faulkner is not wrong that Epic has by sheer count the most APIs. But that metric alone does not a platform make. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s (or any system of record\u2019s) 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. <\/p>\n

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\u2019s perhaps fine for a friendly interview, but is perhaps dangerous for the company in this era, given information blocking and antitrust tensions.<\/p>\n

Speaking of which, the show did tackle that topic, albeit briefly:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Epic press tour continues, as Freakonomics interviewed CEO Judy Faulkner last week in \u201cWhat Makes Judy Run\u201d.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":610743,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[97,252,253],"class_list":["post-610742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health-care","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-healthcare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610742\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/610743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}