UF Health St. Johns, based in St. Augustine, Fla., has completed a major step in its digital transformation with the go-live of Epic across its facilities — part of a broader initiative that also included a full infrastructure upgrade and a transition to a new enterprise resource planning system.
The implementation aimed to create a unified patient record and improve care coordination, according to Melissa Cecil, chief applications officer for UF Health and associate CIO of UF Health St. Johns.
“It was really about continuity of care,” Ms. Cecil told Becker’s. “We had a lot of disparate systems which put a lot of extra steps on our clinicians to be able to care for the patient. We were having people have to log into two to three different systems to really get the full picture of their patient.”
UF Health acquired the St. Johns facility in 2023, and the Epic go-live marks a significant step in aligning the hospital with the broader health system. Ms. Cecil emphasized that the rollout’s success was only possible due to what she described as an unmatched level of teamwork.
“The level of collaboration across the teams and the campuses was unprecedented for UF Health, and we really would not have been as successful as we were if we had not had the collaboration and the support from the leadership all the way up,” she said.
To support the go-live, the health system posted 700 shifts across the enterprise, with more than 400 filled by nurses from other campuses and over 200 by students from affiliated medical and nursing schools.
“That made such a difference, because these people work in Epic every single day, and so it’s so much easier when they already understand the workflows, and they’re able to really support our end users,” Ms. Cecil said.
The rollout wasn’t without challenges. The organization had to overhaul its entire technical infrastructure — including firewalls, servers and hardware — to meet UF Health’s standards. Delays with third-party integrations posed additional hurdles, and Ms. Cecil noted that earlier stakeholder engagement might have helped smooth the process.
Still, initial feedback from staff and patients has been “phenomenal,” she said.
“We’ve gotten some really positive feedback, especially now that everything is in one place. It’s saving our staff so much time,” she said. “We were also able to eliminate a number of third-party systems that really took our providers away from a single source.”
Beyond usability improvements, the new system is also enabling better data-driven decision-making.
“This has really given us a lot of visibility — from being able to do data-driven decision-making on staffing needs, clinical outcomes and patient trends — just things we didn’t have visibility into before,” Ms. Cecil said.
The June go-live also included a transition to PeopleSoft for finance and supply chain management. As of mid-June, Ms. Cecil said the project was “on time and on budget.”
Looking ahead, the organization is preparing for its next digital milestone: a July 14 kickoff to standardize workflows across UF Health’s Epic environment.
“We all have Epic now. What we’re working towards is driving to those consistent workflows and being able to really treat our patients the same across the enterprise,” Ms. Cecil said. “So that’s really what we’re tackling … getting everyone back to that foundation system so that we have one Epic enterprise system.”
