Chicago-based CommonSpirit Health aims to move its entire system onto a single EHR by 2030 and is running two years ahead of schedule, executives said during the health system’s May 29 investor call.
The 137-hospital system said 65% of the organization is now on Epic, with two of eight implementation waves live. CommonSpirit has reduced its EHR portfolio from 19 systems to 11 as part of the multi-year OneEHR initiative.
“Now three years in, we’re well into our Epic integration, as well as our move to a single ERP, replacing 12 disparate [enterprise resource planning] systems [with] one,” Michael Browning, system senior executive vice president and CFO, said. “Our Workday ERP should be completed in mid-2027 and we’re ahead of our original schedule in our Epic transition by about two years.”
When Wright Lassiter III took over as CommonSpirit CEO in 2022 — three years after the merger between Englewood, Colo.-based Catholic Health Initiatives and San Francisco-based Dignity Health — one of his top priorities was to unify the health system into a single, integrated entity.
After joining the system, he said CommonSpirit “had more EHR versions than I have fingers on both hands,” and last year announced the system was moving “very fast and aggressively” toward one EHR platform and a single enterprise resource planning platform.
According to CommonSpirit’s May 15 financial report, system facilities that recently moved to Epic have charges greater than 105% of prior charges before conversion, which the system attributed largely to a more robust charge reconciliation process and stronger clinical engagement.
The EHR consolidation is one piece of CommonSpirit’s “One CommonSpirit” strategy, which also includes standardizing operations, aligning technology platforms and reducing legacy inefficiencies across the system.
The health system is also converting to Workday to align procurement, workforce and financial processes. That effort is expected to eliminate 12 disparate systems and 20 software platforms, with completion targeted for early fiscal 2028.
The EHR and ERP transitions come as CommonSpirit works to improve financial performance through Project ImpACT, a systemwide transformation plan focused on revenue optimization, digital and IT, clinical operations, workforce management and growth.
“We set a fairly aggressive goal that we wanted to try to drive between $5 billion and $6 billion worth of value creation across the organization over the next 36 months and we believe that while we’ve achieved a lot of synergies and a lot of operating model improvements, there were still a lot of value we’ve not unlocked in the organization,” Mr. Lassiter said during a Nov. 5 interview at Becker’s 13th Annual CEO+CFO Roundtable.
“We also believe strongly that you can’t cut your way to success and that we can’t say, ‘let’s just reduce costs by X and that will get us there.’ Project IMPACT is an all-hands-on-deck, 36-month initiative across the organization,” he said. “We have corners of the organization that haven’t been touched like they need to be from an efficiency perspective. So let’s look at everything; nothing is off the table.”
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