Pittsburgh-based UPMC has spent the last several months planning to unify its 40 hospitals and 800-plus locations under a single instance of Epic EHR. The health system has around 10 disparate instances and bringing them together has been a monumental project.
With around four months to go before the go-live, Chris Carmody, chief technology officer of UPMC, describes his team’s efforts as “sprinting a marathon.”
“We’ve been working so hard to create this seamless experience for clinicians,” he said during an interview with Becker’s Health IT + Digital Health Spotlight video series. “We feel this is a great opportunity to leverage a single instance of Epic to help really enable that innovation, the scaling out of different new technology to build on this platform.”
The health system dubbed its EHR unification the “UPMC Bridges Project” as a metaphor for the mission of bridging disparate systems and regions of care into one digital environment. The process has gone relatively smoothly, Mr. Carmody said, because of his team’s preparation and approach. They’re taking a global view of the impact and accountabilities to yield results.
“This isn’t an IT project. It’s not me and it’s not our IT team. It’s the organization that is stepping forward in unison to say we need to do this for improving our patient care, for improving our environment, so we can align our resources to apply them to do the next best thing as we move forward,” he said. “This is a team sport, not an individual sport. This is not IT telling our doctors and nurses and technical folks how to do their job. It’s partnering together; it’s collaboration. It’s communicating and it’s decision-making, all wrapped into one big program with lots of great governance to make sure we move forward collectively.”
The EHR unification is a whole organization project, but the IT team and responsibilities will change as a result. UPMC transacts about 43 million ADT interfaces every 24 hours to stitch patient records and data together with its current EHR setup. Mr. Carmody said his team has a great system to successfully execute on the organization’s current needs. That will soon change.
“Wouldn’t it be better if we can redirect those talented IT resources to actually work on generative AI and have less of that data traversing and more innovation applying to how we deliver patient care?” he said.
The transition will also make team communication and collaboration easier. Clinicians and administrative staff will be able to work seamlessly with the IT team to overcome any roadblocks with the transition to keep the organization running smoothly.
“We have to work with all our stakeholders out there to engage, inform, educate and help them come over the ‘wall of change’ so they accept it, understand it and process it, and they can figure out how their job is going to be different from yesterday to today and into the future,” said Mr. Carmody. “The most important change will be for patient engagement. We have to inform and educate them on the changes that may impact them as they receive care at UPMC. They’ll have better open access because of the one unified EHR platform and we don’t want them missing or skipping a beat in how we deliver care.”
UPMC plans to go-live with the first wave of 20 hospitals and hundreds of care sites, but there will still be around half of the organization on legacy systems. The organization will have a “delicate balance” between going from the optimization phase and then ramping up for the next go-live.
“Once we do that, it’ll be great for everyone to take a deep breath and settle in. Then we turn on the jets and the burners to go after all the innovation that’s possible,” said Mr. Carmody. “We’re excited with the release of Epic that we’ll have 11 of their generative AI models built into the platform. That acceleration to include generative AI tools immediately is a great benefit that we’re not just taking them from the EHR they have today to another similar one; we’re actually building upon that and off of that with our expertise.”
As excited as Mr. Carmody is about the opportunities with AI, he is also cautious. His team is focused on ensuring the technology is secure and has the highest level of integrity and privacy built in. UPMC has processes and procedures in place for digital tech integration, and an AI governance framework to review AI proposals and ensure they’re a good fit within the scope and mission of the organization.
“AI is evolving and it’s going to continue to have its different failures or opportunities,” said Mr. Carmody. “We want to make sure that’s controlled and we’re able to resolve any issues that would arise. We’re very cautious and intentional about our process to make sure we put the highest level of integrity of an AI model or platform.”
UPMC currently has ambient listening technology and Mr. Carmody sees transformational change ahead with AI.
“I think we’re on the cusp of technology truly breaking down these four walls of being in the hospital,” he said. “We talk about the patient at home and remote patient monitoring and telemedicine and patient portals. We’re at the cusp of really leveraging that transformation to where we’re not only going to make access easier, we’re going to make it more broad and more scaled out so people can actually be seen in a timely manner.”
AI and digital health will push the boundaries of traditional care delivery, and connected health systems with the right infrastructure in place will be poised to lead the charge.
“An organization like UPMC is going to be brimming with possibility and opportunities, and how we can touch people’s lives both on the care delivery side, and also from an insurance services provider side, to make it an overall better experience and give people better lives,” said Mr. Carmody.
Mr. Carmody is a speaker at the 10th Annual Health IT + Digital Health + RCM Conference, Sept. 30-Oct. 3 at the Hyatt Regency Chicago. Join 500+ health system speakers and 2,500 attendees at this world-class event designed to foster innovation and peer-to-peer collaboration shaping the future of healthcare delivery. Click here to learn more and register.
