There are a couple of use cases that the new platform is solving, that were not straight-forward in the old system. Primarily the fact that your GP/family doctor and the hospital system did not have access to a common set of health records, they had to send specific requests for copies back and forth. As an example, when you're pregnant you get this special paper booklet where all your information gets recorded by GP/ultrasound/midwife/etc., and when you go to give birth you have to bring this booklet and give it to the midwife so they can see your pregnancy-related health records.

But we have had for a long time a website called "Helsenorge" where you can log in and access most of your health records. For example during covid this was used to give you PCR test results and that worked flawlessly, you get an SMS notification when you have updates to see.

So a big part of the "why on earth are they using this Epic software" sentiment is the feeling that we would be much better off by extending the Helsenorge system to do what we need. Especially since it's only a small part of the country going with the Epic system, and other parts will run other systems - a legacy of the previous privatisation-trigger-happy government.

There are also a lot of obviously broken things on the end-user side in Epic Mycharts. For one, you cannot change the language in the app, it is tied to your phone system language. So if you're Norwegian but prefer to use Android/iOS in English, you're stuck with poor translations to English that you have to guess-translate back again to Norwegian.

The app needs a new login after 10 minutes of inactivity, and this login is using a semi-complicated Norway-specific MFA called BankID that is run by the banking sector, so the login flow takes about a minute to complete. This means you can't actually get push notifications from the app, since it's never logged in while running in the background. So you get SMS and/or email notifications instead.

There is a lot of cruft related to insurance and billing stuff you have to scroll through in the menus that will never be useful to anyone in this country, and nobody understands why they can't just hide those buttons.

There are three different types of messages you can send - Letter, Question and Message - nobody knows what is the difference and one of them redirects you to the other when you start to compose something.

When you go to view your health records summary, there is a big text box at the top which says "Take care, the results here might be displayed in a mixture of Norwegian and American formats" - they have obviously not learned the lessons of the Mars Climate Orbiter failure. For instance it says "Marital status: Gift" on my summary.

To access my children's health records I had to send Proxy Data Requests for each one, which went through a rather complicated login flow every time. Then after three weeks I got a message from some random person saying I have access, apparently there are some poor souls sitting somewhere and manually verifying that yes, this person is the child of that person, even though that information is already in the Helsenorge database.

All in all it seems that either the Epic system is such a horrible pile of fragile spaghetti code that nobody dares to touch it and adapt it to our use case, or we are simply such a small customer that they can't be arsed to fix our woes.

It kinda feels like when you are using any product from Google or Microsoft, only in this case you're paying Microsoft a couple hundred million to adapt the software to your organization and still have that feeling.