David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…This is the best way to do this, period. We’re just going to teach everybody the best way to do everything, and everybody is going to be reasonably robotic. We can trust that once we squeeze you through the Epic System, when you come out the other side, you are able to operate in a way that works really, really, really well in our machine, where people can really trust each other. Because of that high level of trust, there are very few middle managers. You understand the system that everybody else works within, and you don’t have to corral chaos. Most of the people that are hiring are right out of school, so they’ve been there for a long time. They don’t have budgets, which you can only do when you have a high trust environment like this. There are some financial controls of course, but Judy’s got this great story that she used to go see customers and they’d say, oh this is the right thing to do. I just don’t have the budget for it this year, so we’re going to push it next year. She’s like, that’s stupid. Or they would tell her, can we squeeze this in this year? Because if I don’t spend this money, I’m going to lose it in my budget. And she would say, well that’s also stupid, so at my company, we’re not going to have budgets like that. They’re super light on titles. You might have a business card, whether you’ve been there 20 years or 6 months, that says implementation, that you hand to a customer when you go and do an engagement. Everyone does immersion trips, where the software developers, everyone is required to spend time in clinical settings like operating rooms to directly observe workflows. I think when you start you have to do five of them, and then you do more every year. Wow. Y Combinator preaches, go talk to your customers, spend time with customers. Epic’s been doing this forever. This is the Epic way that (I think) the rest of the world woke up to and startups internalized as doctrine. But every person in the company, spending time in medical settings, talking to customers, hugely valuable. On the developer side, there’s a super prescriptive software methodology that they use to minimize bugs. You go through this intensive training for six months when you join, and then when you start programming, the whole system is designed to run minimizing the number of hours between when a line of code is written and then when it is tested, so if a bug is found, then you drop everything as the original developer and you fix it, so that you still have the whole context fresh in your head. You don’t go months, then the system gets tested, and bugs aren’t allowed to compound into bigger problems this way. They get caught right away.…

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