Aspen Valley Health, a critical access hospital in Colorado, is taking on a role typically reserved for large health systems: serving as an Epic host for other rural providers through the vendor’s Community Connect program.
The strategy aims to give small, independent organizations access to enterprise EHR infrastructure and shared services without requiring system affiliation, CIO Michelle Gelroth told Becker’s.
The approach stems from Aspen Valley’s own experience trying — and ultimately abandoning — the traditional model.
“We initially tried to operate as a smaller organization on a large health system’s Epic platform,” Ms. Gelroth said. “We started that in 2015 and exited by 2017 because it became clear that scaling a large system down to a small hospital is incredibly difficult.”
Aspen Valley instead implemented Epic independently, becoming one of the vendor’s smallest customers.
“We were Epic’s smallest customer when we started, and today we rank near the top across many benchmarks — downtime, provider efficiency and user satisfaction,” Ms. Gelroth said. “We’ve proven that scale isn’t the only path to performance.”
That experience prompted the organization to participate in Epic’s Community Connect program, which has already begun.
Aspen Valley expanded its Epic environment beyond its own organization by first connecting with a local school district. The hospital is also partnering with Heart of the Rockies Regional Medical Center in Salida, Colo., to implement the EHR system. The initial go-live target is May 1, 2027, with implementation kickoff expected this May.
Epic is closely involved in the effort.
“They’re heavily involved because I think they too want to find a solution for rural hospitals and those hospitals that really want to remain independent,” Ms. Gelroth said.
Aspen Valley is also in active discussions with additional hospitals across Colorado.
“We have about eight or nine hospitals throughout the state of Colorado that we’ve been having really deep conversations with around this project,” Ms. Gelroth said.
The organization is selectively onboarding partners based on strategic alignment, organizational readiness and financial stability, prioritizing hospitals that understand the model as an enterprise transformation — not just an IT deployment.
“It’s not an IT project,” Ms. Gelroth said. “They really need to understand that it’s a whole organization effort.”
More broadly, the model challenges a long-standing assumption in health IT: that small hospitals need large systems to access enterprise technology.
“Epic gave us a shot to be their smallest customer,” Ms. Gelroth said. “I think we’ve proven that we can be very successful.”
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