Buffalo, N.Y.-based Kaleida Health is implementing Epic along with two other area healthcare organizations, consolidating 13 EHRs to one.
The five-hospital system plans to go live with the new EHR in the second quarter of 2026, followed by its Community Connect partners — Buffalo-based Erie County Medical Center Corp. and the University at Buffalo — in the fourth quarter.
“We’re working together in western New York with the goal of improving the health and well-being of our community, and really driving toward a population health ecosystem,” Kaleida Health CIO Courtney Starnes told Becker’s. “For the first time, we’re going to have a single longitudinal patient record that spans across all of our different care settings, the providers and care teams of the three different organizations.”
The organizations are replacing a combination of Athenahealth, Medent, Meditech and Oracle Health with Epic — Kaleida Health alone is sunsetting 13 EHRs — and making decisions and doing readiness activities collaboratively. The three entities kicked off the implementation in late 2024, and are now testing the system, preparing for training, and identifying super users. About 200 Kaleida Health employees are focused primarily on Epic full time.
The Buffalo health system joins Springfield, Ill.-based Memorial Health — which is going live with Epic with a large Connect partner, Springfield-based SIU Medicine, in 2027 — in currently taking a collaborative approach to implementation.
“We chose Epic because their values and guiding principles align with our mission of continuous improvement, population health and continued collaboration, and so we felt together, as the three organizations coming together, that this would be the best cornerstone for this broader strategy,” said Ms. Starnes, who started her career with EHR vendor Cerner (now Oracle Health). “It’s more than just a technology upgrade — it’s really about: How do we shift to create that population health ecosystem?”
She looks forward to improved patient engagement, with enhanced virtual care, online scheduling and patient portal offerings, as well as a better care team experience and more research and innovation opportunities. Kaleida Health plans to take on Epic’s AI “starter kit,” trialing solutions to determine which fit best.
The $2.5 billion system is also hosting monthly town hall meetings on the project, sending out newsletters to employees once a month, and continuously sharing updates to Erie County Medical Center Corp. and the University at Buffalo.
“Change management is one of the biggest things to watch out for on a project of this size,” Ms. Starnes said. “You can never anticipate how much change it’s actually going to create for your teams. There’s always opportunity to do more.”
