Health systems typically spend years absorbing the cost and disruption of implementing EHRs. Now, a growing number of CIOs say the calculus is shifting — and the driver is AI.
The EHR’s value is not primarily what it delivered in the early going; it’s what the platform makes possible now and into the future, health system IT leaders told Becker’s.
“With AI, I mean, it’s amazing,” said Chad Brisendine, vice president and CIO of Bethlehem, Pa.-based St. Luke’s University Health Network. “We’ve put in over 100 AI solutions in the last 12 months. A lot of that is in the ability to generate revenue, some of it’s in the productivity space, but more of it’s in the revenue generation space.”
St. Luke’s, now a 16-hospital system, went live on Epic in 2016. It took nearly seven years for the organization to recoup its initial spending — a timeline Mr. Brisendine said reflects the scale of the investment, but one that perhaps obscures the now-underway acceleration. One area already showing measurable returns: ambient documentation.
“Providers that use ambient are seeing one to two more patients per day,” Mr. Brisendine said. “If you quartile out the physicians — top performers versus bottom performers — we obviously saw a dip with the EHR, and we’ve seen that come back plus some when they use ambient.”
Vishal Jain, senior vice president and interim CIO of Baltimore-based University of Maryland Medical System, said the organization does not attempt to attach a single dollar figure to its EHR. The reasons are partly practical and partly philosophical.
“The nature of these systems is so integrated, and there’s so much overlap, that to draw a neat line around EHR spend gets really fuzzy,” Mr. Jain said. “Then you start to spend a lot of time debating those numbers rather than focusing on outcomes.”
But, Mr. Jain said, “The future will be different. The ROI is [going to be] less about the new technologies that underpin what we do or the digitization of workflows. It is going to be: Does that EHR allow for more automation, workflow orchestration, AI, and further consumer engagement?”
He said that as those tools mature, the value of the existing EHR investment becomes clearer.
“Right now it’s a little bit hard to connect the dots,” Mr. Jain said. “But once you start to say, now we’re reducing the cognitive burden, or now we’re seeing actual improvements to revenue cycle opportunities and throughput, those numbers become a little bit more highlighted.”
Albany (N.Y.) Med Health System unified under an Epic EHR across its four hospitals and more than 100 community locations in late 2024, generating more than 375,000 MyChart activations and standardizing workflows across the enterprise.
The initial year-plus was about implementation and stabilization, said Scot Van Sickle, interim chief digital officer at Albany Med. What comes next is different.
“As we mature our use of the platform and leverage more advanced capabilities, we expect to realize increasing value from optimization efforts, predictive analytics, and AI-enabled workflows that improve both the patient and provider experience,” he said.
Fountain Valley, Calif.-based MemorialCare measures EHR value across four indicators: clinical outcomes, provider experience, patient access and engagement, and financial performance, said Senior Vice President and CIO Steven Beal. Coming soon: AI convergence.
“We see a future state defined by an intelligent EHR, where predictive insights, ambient documentation, and real-time decision support are seamlessly embedded at the point of care,” he said. “The next phase of EHR value will be defined by its ability to translate data into timely, actionable insight.”
Chif Umejei, senior vice president and CIO of New York City-based NewYork-Presbyterian, agreed that the platforms’ most valuable output is yet to come.
“The data captured and harmonized in the EHR is foundational for future insights in research, data science and the artificial intelligence frontier,” he said. “Looking ahead, we expect that value to continue to grow as we further leverage the data to identify risk earlier, personalize care, and reduce administrative burden so clinicians can focus more on patient care and improved outcomes.”
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