Epic’s Ryan Krause invests in the Epic community’s financial health
Epic staff member Ryan Krause was a finance and economics double major. He expected to work at a finance company, but he wanted to make a difference. So he chose to work at Epic, connecting his business background with Epic’s focus on using an integrated patient record, from the bedside to the billing office, to transform the delivery of patient care.
A culture of commitment to customers and the opportunity to support healthcare drew him to Epic.
“Epic wasn’t even a household name in Madison yet, but I liked the people and the culture,” Ryan said. “Everybody seemed to be all-in with making sure that they were doing the best thing for the community.”
Starting a career in healthcare IT didn’t mean a complete departure from finance, though. Ryan became an installer on the then-new Hospital Billing team.
Over his more than 15 years at Epic, Ryan has helped both individual health systems and the overall Epic community share best practices for a healthy revenue cycle. He’s focused on initiatives that support this sharing and revenue cycle transparency, such as quick metrics for executives through Financial Pulse. In Financial Pulse, built-in peer benchmarking links directly to successful financial improvement initiatives shared by Epic community members for their peers to replicate.
One of the projects he’s most passionate about is improving price transparency and preventing surprise bills for patients.
“We’ve been doing price estimates in Epic for almost a decade,” Ryan said. “Our goal was always to get that information at the point of ordering. A lot of refinement went into that, but with today’s increasing deductible amounts, it’s been transformative for patients. ”
“Why We Do What We Do” is a series of stories from Epic staff about how their work relates to their personal missions to help our community members serve their patients and transform healthcare delivery.
