The Mayo Clinic has completed its installation of a single, integrated Epic electronic health record and revenue cycle management system at its Arizona and Florida campuses.
The October 6 go-live was the fourth and final planned implementation across the enterprise, which began last year with Mayo Clinic Health System Wisconsin and Mayo Clinic Health System Minnesota—followed by the install earlier this year at the Mayo Clinic campus in Rochester, Minn.
Steve Peters, MD, Mayo Clinic’s chief medical information officer, says the implementations at the Arizona and Florida campuses were conducted simultaneously.
“They were on the same version of their legacy record, and it made the most sense to bring them up at the same time,” comments Peters, co-chair of the Plummer Project—the official name of the Epic rollout dubbed in honor of Henry Plummer, MD, who created the world’s first patient-centered, unified health record at Mayo Clinic more than a century ago.
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Mayo’s Plummer Project has replaced scores of separate EHRs and revenue cycle management systems with one system, according to Peters.
“We had literally hundreds of smaller departmental system and revenue cycle systems that will be sunset,” he adds. “Having a single system allows us to diffuse our best practices and disseminate our knowledge—examples of clinical decision support, disease-based order sets and registries of complex conditions are now all in one system. It allows us to deliver consistent care in a very efficient way.”
Overall, the Mayo Clinic took about three years—from approval to implementation—to complete the health IT modernization project at a price tag of approximately $1.5 billion, including network upgrades and additional cybersecurity investments. “There are about 65,000 employees total, and about 58,000 we think will be using this system,” says Peters.
“We are happy to report that the implementation has gone quite well,” adds Peters. “We have a fair number of experienced users from our Upper Midwest sites who are down in Arizona and Florida helping, along with Epic and Deloitte. Having a system that we’ve now had for almost a year and a half in production, with most of the workflows and bugs worked out, has really seemed to pay off because things have gone very smoothly these first few days—far fewer (problem) tickets and issues than we had in our previous go-live.”
Date: October 12, 2018
Source: HealthDataManagement