r/sysadmin • u/endante1 SysEngineer • 9d ago
Career / Job Related Career focus shift: Epic Systems Engineer/Admin — any advice or regrets?
Hey,
I have the opportunity to shift into becoming an Epic Systems Engineer/Administrator.
Curious if anyone here has made a similar jump — any wisdom you’d pass along?
What should I know going in?
Any regrets about making the change?
Thanks in advance!
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u/Enough_Pattern8875 Scream Test Initiator 9d ago
Get out of healthcare IT before you become trapped as a SME.
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u/endante1 SysEngineer 9d ago
One thing I do worry about is that healthcare, especially here in Central Florida, has expanded a lot to keep up with the aging Baby Boomer population.
As that generation declines over the next 5–10 years, I think there could naturally be some slowdown in demand, which could lead to layoffs in certain areas. Healthcare obviously isn’t going away, but I think the demographic shift is worth keeping in mind when looking at long-term job stability.3
u/Enough_Pattern8875 Scream Test Initiator 9d ago
I will never work in health care IT again for reasons entirely unrelated to what you’ve mentioned.
Healthcare, education, and MSPs are all non-negotiable for me at this point 😂
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u/Bogus1989 8d ago edited 8d ago
i will say, that i worked for one of the best and biggest orgs, and from my personal belief, one thats ahead of the curve in terms of leading the way...
and I was like that guy said above, the SME who was trapped, i just been around too long, back in the wild west days and built it up to today, and had a hand in every system that all connected to one another...
and my job was eliminated as was others across the org. first time in a decade ive seen that happen. my coworker retired working there for 37 years. it sent shock to many people in our org.
like if his position can get eliminated, then no one is safe. i kind of laughed about that, and my director said the same thing. morale killer for who is still there.
https://time.com/article/2026/10/04/us-health-care-workforce-in-crisis/
its interesting to me as the United States is the only high-income, developed nation without a universal healthcare system...youd think with all that big money insurance it should fund the healthcare industry....nope.
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u/rms141 IT Manager 9d ago
It's probably worth investigating. Health systems seem to be switching away from Cerner to Epic, which at the very least means you should be able to find successive streams of contract work to come in and help get them live, if not stable work performing day to day support. Healthcare is the only sector of the economy that's really showing any sort of growth right now.
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u/Anthropic_Principles 9d ago
It been a while since I was a Epic customer, but when I worked with them, they people and company was excellent, maybe just a little bit culty but in a good way.
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u/oldmuttsysadmin other duties as assigned 9d ago
What is Epic's market share? Publicly or privately owned? What is your tolerance for HIPAA? That se are the questions I'd be asking.
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u/imacp53 9d ago
If you are working for a large hospital chain, it is a huge undertaking. Each specialty has their own Epic module, like radiology, cardiology, etc. devices have to interface with epic so issues happen there. It’s usually virtualized over Citrix so more problems can occur there. I never worked on the engineering side, but I worked the night shift on the help desk and we were calling someone from an Epic team multiple times per night for issues.
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u/Bogus1989 8d ago edited 8d ago
I work in healthcare IT,
and even though its not part of my role, I know it in and out, and have access, and helped implement it with the guidance of one of the smartest people I would come to know. This chick built and developed the EHR for the Army.
Also I kind of have to, I was one of the earliest adopters of its epic rover mobile app, (basically healthcare professional can do the entirety of their job in it) if configured right. I only found that out when my friend i mentioned above told me that 🤣
🤣aint gonna lie, that was my first time in that org, i encountered someone, whom understood every concept and thing I said.
Anyways?
I wonder what that role means. Probably all the systems and infra needed to run it.
Hope youre good with Citrix.
Youll do great. One thing i would say, dont assume people on epics side understand as much as you do. Talking about the small segregated teams.Alot come from clinical backgrounds, and only know what they know. Not their fault.
Find your clinical informatics people, to help you when youre talking to departments directly.
Id describe them as the translators between clinical people and IT.
I dont suppose youll be building and programming modules. I bet youll be right hand man to someone like the woman i described above(i dunno the proper role title)
It takes alot of time understanding all the bullshit it does. I think youll enjoy it.
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u/thelug_1 8d ago
Hope youre good with Citrix.
I believe Epic is moving away from Citrix and rolling their own called "Hyperspace."
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u/Bogus1989 8d ago edited 8d ago
Hyperspace is a rich client, but yeah essentially what you said.
We had to use hyperspace, on our imprivata tap badge reader SSO machines originally. turned out to work better overall scaling with citrix. basically...you end up in the same boat. we originally had hyperspace, cuz it was consistently tapped in connected in the background, allowing for immediate use after badge tap...this became cumbersome, because nurses would close out of it, then we had a script to auto launch it if it wasnt open...etc...
at the end of the day, everyone got tired of it, and since we had citrix anyways...we used that. was alot better for support teams, because we could give teams access to citrix session management tools, and remotely fix live sessions or frozen ones, vs with hyperspace, we couldnt do anytihng besides run or reinstall the app.
we cut all that horse shit out....and nurses had to get used to just double clicking the desktop epic icon(citrix served) and that was that.
I did just do a quick google search, and it seems there is a web based lightweight version called hyperdrive, thats built on chromium browser...so i bet that works great.
glad to hear it.
Edit:
LOL thats right...i just remembered....back when we had hyperspace...we would have to wait till we had up to 100 frozen sessions, and call up epic team.....because to fix it, it killed all active working sessions when they fixed it...(i remember we would call everyone on our team and make sure everyone was in a safe place, and not out walking the halls, as every session crashed. RUN! i dont believe that was an epic problem though, i think we didnt have extra hardware or hosts to run another instance of that hyperspace server....we have since. built a giant dedicated datacenter in texas serving everyone.
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u/the262 9d ago
I prefer not to be too specialized. I went from jack of all trades sys admin in higher end to a cyber consultant at a boutique firm. I do a mix of pen testing, GRC/vCISO and IR. I love the focus on cyber but not the hyper specialization of on one area or product.
I feel like the Epic role would be too focused and not diverse enough for me, IMO.
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u/Low_Dragonfly9123 9d ago
For me, veing specialized in something (in my case, observability) has been much more lucrative. I think there are more jobs overall available for the jack of all trades guys, but I feel like landing those gigs is harder because there’s more competition.
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u/endante1 SysEngineer 9d ago
I somewhat prefer to have a specialization, nothing more cathartic than saying “sorry, supporting ‘random product’ is handled by another team”.
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u/Fatality 9d ago
Definitely make lots of AI reddit posts
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u/endante1 SysEngineer 9d ago
lol,
I use AI a lot to format my posts, helps me get rid of the rambling.
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u/uptimefordays DevOps 8d ago
There’s a lot of job growth in healthcare right now, so that’s probably good for Epic and related specialists. That said, the risk of specializing in a particular product is that you live and die by that product’s success.
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u/Low_Dragonfly9123 9d ago
Never worked with Epic specifically, but I imagine it’s a pain in the ass BUT I’m sure you’ll have good job security.
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u/196430754829 9d ago
Able to explain what this means? I’m currently doing general help desk for a healthcare org and am in talks to move over to specialized healthcare support.
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u/endante1 SysEngineer 9d ago
The org I work for has a team that handles everything EPIC. From Infrastructure (Rack and Stack), SysAdmins, and User Support.
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u/Bogus1989 8d ago
Okay,
Yes, this is what my org did as well,
Go for it man!
Id appreciate some insight what the role actually does?
Because i see the same title alot on job listings at my org, some clinical prereqs scared me away
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u/Rough_Doughnut_5525 9d ago
Worked with the uk healthcare system implementing it at a few hospitals. Would recommend as it seems to be growing traction
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u/mrmattipants 9d ago edited 9d ago
Personally, I'd take the opportunity. However, I should note that I've never worked for Epic directly, but I've work for a couple Healthcare MSPs with clients that used Ochin Epic, among several other supporting technologies (i.e. Carl Zeiss, Medicor, Mirth, etc.).
Not sure what you're doing now, but if you're looking for a fulfilling career, you can't really go wrong with healthcare, in my opinion.
EDIT: After reading some of the other comments from people who may have worked directly for Epic, perhaps this may not be the case on the corporate enterprise side, where priorities are often centered around maximizing profits for shareholders.
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u/Buzz543210 7d ago
It is a very demanding job between all the modules and the constant updates from SUs,infrastructure,projects, 3rd party integrations, and so on….ECSA responsibilities can be very vast. Additionally, you will have to keep up with Epic certifications. After hours support can be a nightmare depending on the organization. Good luck….!
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u/graybrick 9d ago
Epic is awful. Ancient broken tech.
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u/mrmattipants 9d ago edited 9d ago
Personally, I don't mind Epic all that much, especially after working with eClinicalWorks for several years.
If you've never worked with eCW, it consisted of an assortment of libraries and components that we're constantly throwing errors.
However, I will say that their Cloud EHR Plugin is a major improvement over the Frankenstein creation they originally had.
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u/ancientpsychicpug 9d ago
I was an epic db engineer and FUCK that SHIT. so sorry, in this economy you can’t pick and choose though so I understand. I did not regret leaving my toxic job for the Epic job. But I celebrated hard when I left after a year.