Switching to Epic. Some questions.

Hello all. My organization is switching to Epic from Cerner. I’ve been an analyst, consultant, and architect for PowerChart for about 10 years now. I’m considered an expert among my peers and usually the one on my team doing root cause resolution for most issues. I’ve focused on ambulatory and inpatient venues (in different roles) and focused on physician and nursing workflows at any given point in my career. I’ll be transitioning to an ambulatory focused role in the new Epic environment. My main questions are around the certification process. I am terrible at tests. To give an example, one of the ways I’ve gotten recognition on my team is by getting very good with the database query language called CCL. Despite writing some pretty complex queries, I struggled taking a test on the subject. How difficult are these tests? Are there any external books I can look into (didn’t find many on a Amazon search)? In addition, everything is much more segregated it seems. For example, I’m used to building my own orders and documentation. These are different roles in our new org structure and have their own architect level positions. Does this mean I won’t be building these things anymore or does that mean I’ll still know about them? Finally, what’s querying like? I’ve heard Epic uses a hierarchial database instead of a relational one like Cerner does. I find that looking at things on the back end and working with the data in Excel makes me very efficient. I can confirm build was done perfectly to spec and I can find problems pretty quickly. Is there a SQL front end with Epic or are queries/extracts done differently? Thanks!
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