DISCLAIMER: This article is NOT REAL. Well, it is real in that it does exist, but it doesn’t contain factual information. It is made up for the purposes of entertainment. And isn’t that the real truth? Probably not.
Press Conference, Verona, Wisconsin
Thank you for coming, everybody. I am a random employee of Epic Systems who lost a bet, so I now have to provide today’s announcement. So please respond positively to it, or I will get fired, even though it’s not my idea.
We want to start by underscoring our commitment to maintaining the privacy of all patient data that is entered into the Epic EMR. We take this health information very seriously, more seriously than anything else, except for adding needless features to our product to make more money.
An employer with access to their employee’s medical record, who thus knows what kind of cough medicine was prescribed to them five years ago, can be way too damaging, and we are committed to doing everything to stop the reckless use of such valuable data.
A few months ago, we created a task force to provide recommendations on the best way to improve Epic security, and they came up with some excellent suggestions. But we have decided not to listen to any of their ideas and came up with even better ones.
The solutions we have chosen all rely on the physician doing more work, as that is the most cost-effective way for us to make changes. I know people are concerned about physician burnout and the amount of time they spend on the EMR, as are we. Physicians are the backbone of how we make money. Thankfully, these solutions will actually decrease the amount of time they are logged into the EMR.
To safeguard patients’ protected information, healthcare workers will now be required to engage in five levels of encryption to log in to Epic. These include:
- A password — but it’s gotta be, like, I don’t know, 30 characters long or something, with a bunch of symbols and numbers and stuff. Including an umlaut somewhere might be helpful.
- A changing number keychain thingy. You know those things where the really long number changes like every 10 seconds or something? You know those things? That’s what I’m talking about. One of those things.
- An ear lobe sensor that matches up complete biometrics.
- A necessary code you can only get by logging in to a different website with its own multi-factor authentication.
- A prick of your blood onto a cool little thing on the keyboard to make sure it is you.
You’ll then need to repeat step five every three minutes to remain logged in.
I know that this may seem like a lot, but our data shows that these efforts will decrease the likelihood of a data breach by about 3%. This was the most effective thing we could think of to improve the security of our patients’ precious data. We also looked into things like faxing in a code, FedEx-ing a code and even carrier pigeons, for crying out loud, but they were a little too expensive. We figured it’d be better to just require more blood from each of the doctors.
Whether you guys like these changes or not, you will eventually stop complaining about all of our other updates, so I’m sure you’ll get used to it. We ignore your complaints for the first six months or so after any updates anyway. We’ll now take absolutely no questions. Thank you.
