Over the last few months, discussions have begun among Salem Health administrative and operational leaders, medical staff leadership and nursing leadership (including the Strategic Advisory Committee and Quality Operations Committee) regarding our current Epic product and the future of our electronic medical record.
Because we adopted Epic in 2006, our current version is highly customized, as was typical of application installations at that time. This customized structure results in complicated upgrades with lengthy build freezes, as it takes two to three times the amount of work for us to retrofit standard enhancements to our instance of Epic. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way!
We are not the only ones who have felt the burn (or rather, chill) of the build freeze phenomenon. As hospitals and providers have worked over the years to navigate the changing health care landscape, Epic has watched, listened and modified its model to provide a product that can keep up. All new Epic customers are implemented on the “foundation” model, which is the compilation of best practices collected from leading physicians and institutions across the U.S. As current Epic users, we have the ability to “refuel” our system to align with Epic Foundation, which would allow us to more smoothly conform to new workflows, implement new features, increase end user efficiencies and eventually do away with significant build freezes.
This is one of many options for aligning our electronic medical record with best practices and the steadily increasing demands of the industry. As we begin to plan our path, we will continue to look to the medical staff, nursing leadership and administration to help us determine our next steps. Stay tuned, as there is definitely more to come!