Stories by Marc Eisen

If Madison and Dane County ever rise to a top ten metro area for technology, the driver will almost certainly be the growth of health-related technology companies led by former employees of  Epic Systems, the  Verona-headquartered leader in electronic health records.

It’s a good bet that Madison-area software writers, many of them bright Epic expats, jumped up pumping their fists when they read that Epic would shortly launch the “App Exchange” and “open the floodgates” to developers, as pioneer Madison tech entrepreneur Mark Bakken told the Wisconsin State Journal.

Bakken compared the App Exchange to Apple’s wildly successful App Store.

This was huge news. For all the good Epic has done for the Dane County community, it has shown steely indifference to the local health IT industry. The company’s intense focus on serving its worldwide 315 customers has never included playing Big Sister to expats dreaming of devising health software to piggyback onto the company’s proprietary system.

Bakken begged off from further commenting on the App Exchange, emailing, “My hands are tied on anything related to this and Epic in general right now.” Epic spokesman Shawn Kiesau also declined to comment.

But Bakken may have been overly exuberant in his prediction. A local tech leader, who asked for anonymity for business reasons, says Epic insiders say it’s a misnomer to compare Epic’s soon-to-launch App Exchange with Apple’s App Store.

To read more,  please go here.

This longer related story appeared in the same issue of Isthmus.

This entry was posted on March 19, 2015 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Development, Tech, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Dan Wilson, Epic Systems, Mark Bakken