Epic’s Gold Stars program measures two different things: how many of the EHR vendor’s features a health system has turned on, known as configuration, and how thoroughly staff actually use what’s been switched on, known as usage. A perfect 10 in the former is uncommon. A perfect 10 in the latter had never happened — until this year.
At Epic’s Users Group Meeting in Verona, Wis., last month, the company named Jacksonville, Fla.-based Baptist Health the first health system in the program’s history to earn a perfect 10 for usage. Epic founder and CEO Judy Faulkner told attendees during her keynote that organizations with higher Gold Stars scores tend to perform better financially, though she cautioned the company could not say the relationship was causal.
Aaron Miri, DHA, executive vice president and chief digital and information officer at Baptist Health, told Becker’s the achievement was two years in the making and had little to do with budget.
“Listening to your clinicians — once you get through the initial apprehension of ‘Are you really going to listen to me?’ and start showing them the receipts, like, I got your back, let’s do it — you can accelerate innovation delivery and get through some of the common misunderstandings that inhibit you from being able to achieve that,” he said. “It took several years [of] focused dedication to build a team and build trust side by side in the trenches. That’s how you do it.”
Baptist reached Gold Stars Level 10 for configuration within 11 months of its Epic go-live, then spent the past two years chasing the usage score. In 2025, the system landed at nine.
“We looked at where the gaps were between last year and this year, which was really in the nursing domain because [of] the complexity of nursing,” Dr. Miri said. “We focused this year to make sure what we did last year, plus what we learned, [became] an evolution to get to 10 of 10. We started on the ambulatory side initially, primary care, others, worked our way through acuity, and then worked our way through all the complexities.”
Some of Epic’s usage metrics look backward — to the past 90 days — rather than forward, which slowed the pace of iteration. “So that means if you make a change, you have to wait some time to see was it effective,” Dr. Miri said.
He credited Baptist’s chief medical officer, chief nursing officer and CFO for locking arms behind the push, framing the usage score as a financial lever rather than an IT vanity metric.
“There’s no reason not to,” he said. “As Judy showed, it actually translates to the bottom line. The higher [your] stars utilization, they can show exactly where the margin improvement is. There’s a direct correlation to ROI on top of patient experience, so why not go for that?”
Baptist’s approach to staffing also shaped the outcome. Rather than leaning on outside consultants to configure and troubleshoot the system, Dr. Miri said Baptist built up its internal clinical informatics team.
“We do not bring in consultants very much. We found CI is able to do a lot of that consulting versus hiring and plugging in,” he said. “I’d rather have that in-house resident knowledge — that it was a nurse or a physician at the bedside that came into IT that learned it.”
It’s consistent with how Dr. Miri has described Baptist’s broader approach to technology change in the past — building buy-in among front-line staff rather than mandating adoption from the top.
Holding onto a perfect score, he said, is its own challenge.
“I was concerned last year, when we were 10 to nine, that — oh shoot, can we get to 10 to 10 without falling behind? Because it gets harder and something else comes up,” Dr. Miri said. “But as long as you keep your foot on the gas, and you’re like a metronome, just staying on top of it, collaborating, and you have trust, you won’t go backwards. You really start building upon that. And the good news is that if you go that far ahead, the next year when it restarts, you’re already at like an eight or a nine. You’re not having to start from square one.”
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