Minneapolis-based Children’s Minnesota is preparing for an Oct. 3 Epic go-live, but the decision behind the implementation was more than a decade in the making.
The health system ran Oracle Health in its hospitals and eClinicalWorks in affiliated ambulatory clinics for roughly 15 years, and the question of whether to transition to Epic continued to come up throughout that time. Timothy Lander, MD, clinical vice president and chief of surgical services at Children’s Minnesota, told Becker’s the decision ultimately reflected several factors, including clinician expectations, referring provider preferences and the organization’s technology roadmap.
The implementation represents a one-time investment of about $175 million over roughly 15 months of planning, build and go-live preparation. Children’s Minnesota expects the new platform to support patient growth and improve revenue capture through more integrated documentation and billing workflows.
“We know that we’re providing care that we’re not getting paid for because the healthcare system is so complicated,” Dr. Lander said. “The electronic health record is integrated with the billing system. It’s all one source of truth.”
Recruitment also factored into the decision.
“I know that if we don’t make this investment and move to a system that our current and future workforce is really demanding, we’re not going to have people that are going to want to work at Children’s,” Dr. Lander said.
Children’s Minnesota is working with implementation partners to support the transition while keeping internal teams responsible for execution. The organization also is using Epic U as its primary workforce training platform and has worked with Epic to help develop pediatric-specific training content.
Dr. Lander said Epic implementation also requires roughly 19,000 to 20,000 build decisions. Children’s Minnesota reviewed those decisions to identify changes expected to have the greatest effect on clinical workflows or core business operations.
The process resulted in 45 high- or critical-impact change topics. Each has an assigned change owner and change coach, with Dr. Lander personally overseeing four.
With go-live approaching, those preparations are becoming more visible across the organization.
“People are starting to get pretty anxious about what go-live is going to look like,” Dr. Lander said. “All of the materials and change management strategies we’ve been working on more or less behind the scenes for the last three years or so are now starting to roll out and become very user-facing. People are starting to get really excited, but also really nervous.”
AI is another area of focus, though Children’s Minnesota is not developing its own clinical AI tools.
Instead, the organization plans to use Epic’s native AI capabilities, including ambient documentation through Chart with ART. Dr. Lander said future capabilities, including agentic AI, could further reduce administrative work by preparing documentation and suggested orders for clinician review within the EHR.
“The kind of AI integration that will really enhance the patient and family experience [is] eliminating the physician from having to spend a lot of time typing on a keyboard in the middle of or after their patient visit,” Dr. Lander said.
For leaders considering a major EHR transition, Dr. Lander said one lesson has become clear well before go-live: the implementation has to belong to the organization, not the technology.
“The organization needs to own it,” Dr. Lander said. “They need to own the change, and they need to primarily make it clinician-facing. If this looks like a business decision that’s driven by finance or the bottom line, it’s not going to land well. We’ve been very fortunate that our user base has been clamoring for this type of change. They’re anxious about it, but this is something that they really want.”
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