Pros
Initially, in the first 2 years, training was excellent and the overall project team was highly motivated to convert to Epic. My peers were awesome to work with, and about 50% of each team had really good, smart, and talented people that contributed and cared for the product. I really cared for my peers and hated to leave them.
Cons
After leaving, I now realize that everything at BS&W was a Con. Management, Project Management, Change Control, you name it; if this company touched it, it turned negative. There were some tight deadlines and mandatory weekend work (everyone was forced to work even though your deadlines were met to promote solidarity - all it did was penalize the diligent workers and help the low performers continue to work at a decrease level of output) along with the mandatory 4 on 1 off 12 hour days to bring a hospital live and corresponding PTO black-outs (is that even legal in the state of Texas?). Normally, we did 2 weeks at this pace and it was very grueling (6:00 am starts and we would leave for dinner between 6:00pm and 9:00 pm depending on your team), but most of the time almost everyone was given a free "recovery week" to try and reduce burn-out. After that it was all downhill. If you were part of the unlucky group that was on a billing team you were screwed....there was absolutely no work-life balance and the team leads and directors made you fully aware of it. Project timelines were always rushed and the PMO was a joke. No one consulted the project team to do any requirements gathering, this all fell to the Project Manager and they were woefully ill-equipped to understand the new Epic system and plan any sort of timeline around it. This lead to not enough time allocated to build/configuration and testing, everything was rushed and there was no possible way a due date or deadline was pushed. There were times my team and I were at the office until 9 and 10:00pm redoing work because someone missed something, and things changed. That was another issue, and maybe it’s a Healthcare thing, but I personally rebuilt one portion of the system 7 times due to changes or lack of foresight. In my opinion this is unacceptable and wastes precious time that most people were already short on. I would not recommend this job to my worst enemy.
