Epic Systems – the software that powers everything – American Healthcare Chronicles

I recently started building products focused on healthcare affordability in the US. As I was ramping up on a new space, the biggest question that sparked my curiosity was: how did we get here? This question is the inspiration for this weekly series chronicling the decisions, accidents, and breakthroughs that built the US healthcare system. To understand why Epic exists, you need to understand what happened to American healthcare after World War II. The wage freeze of 1942 didn’t just create employer-sponsored insurance — it created a three-way relationship between patients, providers, and payers that hadn’t existed before. A doctor saw a patient. But now a third party — the insurer — decided what to pay, and under what conditions. To get paid, physicians had to document, code, and justify every interaction to a bureaucracy with its own rules. Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 added the federal government as the largest single payer in the country. The documentation requirements didn’t…