“With every EHR that you have, there’s numerous ancillary systems that are attached or interface with that core EHR, so we have well over 1,000 ancillary systems touching those 10 EHRs,” he said during an upcoming interview with the Becker’s Healthcare Podcast.
Bringing all EHRs together under one single instance of Epic is a huge investment, but will improve operations as well as the clinician and patient experience.
“Our IT teams have done monumental work just to give that appearance and build interfaces and move data around to do the best we can with the technology that we have, and we’ve done an amazing job over these years to provide that experience. But we feel most of the time like we’re sprinting a marathon and our talented, knowledgeable experts could be using their skills to work on more advancements in different technologies,” Mr. Carmody said.
Mr. Carmody pointed to the health system’s detailed and inclusive planning process for the success it’s having with the transition so far.
“The more you plan, the more open and transparent discussions you have with all the key stakeholders, the better position an organization will be in,” he said. “That’s what’s helped facilitate our success so far in the project; the relationship and the leadership we partner with from a clinical and operational perspective. Revenue cycle, patient access and all the different areas across the institution need to be engaged and involved in the decision process and help define collectively how the organizations move forward. This is not an IT project by any means, it’s enabled by IT, but this truly is an organization transformation that we’re embarking on.”
UPMC was among the first of many big health systems to announce plans for a single instance of the Epic EHR systemwide over the last 18 months. Mr. Carmody said leaders from other organizations have connected with him to swap insights and share perspective on what works well and what doesn’t. They’re also focused on risk management and mitigation.
“As you move forward, there’s going to be things that come up and if you’re best prepared by planning for them, because the project is never going to go exactly as planned. It doesn’t work that way,” he said. “No project ever has, especially one of this size and scale.”
Throughout this year, Mr. Carmody and his team are focused on deploying the first way of go-lives and fixing issues that arise. His team is working with team members on challenges arising and ingesting the existing data into the new environment as well as making sure analytics reporting is set to capture the full longitudinal record on all patients where needed.
“The volume of [of work] is what creates the challenges and the complexity of our environment, and that is creating the awareness that we have to double and triple check our work as we move forward to make sure we don’t miss anything or that as issues arise, we fix them,” Mr. Carmody said.
He also is paying close attention to his team and making sure they’re strongly supported.
“Everyone’s heads down and working very hard. We don’t want folks getting burned out,” said Mr. Carmody. “We really spend a lot of time communicating and reaching out, and making sure that they feel the support of the leadership team. If they have questions or concerns, they [should] feel comfortable raising their hand and asking for help, or asking for us as leaders to remove any barriers or issues that might be in their way.”
Then the team will move into wave two, likely within the second quarter of 2026 to go live with the rest of the system.
“That’s our main focus right now, preparing and ramping up both waves, as we refer to them. But we don’t lose sight that we’re still delivering care 24/7 in our institution,” said Mr. Carmody. “We continue to focus on what are the operational needs today? How do we prioritize that work and make sure that from a timing perspective, when does it make sense to connect the existing environment or wait and position a new technology to be tied into the new single EHR platform?”
