State College, Pa.-based Mount Nittany Health is switching to Epic in May to adopt the latest health IT breakthroughs and give clinicians a platform they’ve been pining for.
The health system, which is anchored by a 260-bed hospital, started implementing the new EHR in July with the help of 60 providers and 80 work groups.
“The rapid advancements in healthcare IT are just mind-boggling right now, and our current EHR vendor really isn’t allowing us to keep up with that,” Mount Nittany Health Chief Health Information Officer Diane Hunt, MD, told Becker’s. “Our patients demand more from us, and Epic is going to allow us to deliver more of that in a timely fashion to our patients.”
Those patients are expecting the types of digital experience they get from other industries — things like appointment scheduling, communication and refill requests — while Mount Nittany Health providers have been asking for better automation and interoperability, she said.
“We’re in central Pennsylvania, so we interact quite a bit with some of the larger academic health centers in the Pennsylvania region,” she said. “Our doctors want to be able to see that information on their patients in a more timely fashion.”
Mount Nittany Health declined to specify the dollar amount for the new EHR, but Dr. Hunt said it’s a “meaningful investment.” The health system has brought on 60 new employees and consultants, and trained and certified its former Meditech analysts on Epic. Dr. Hunt is leading the implementation with the health system’s project management team.
“We’re a small organization, and we’ve been pretty clear from the beginning that this is not just an IT-led project. This is a Mount Nittany Health project,” she said. “In that spirit, governance has been a critical process for us, and it’s been greatly embraced organizationwide.”
“Everybody from our CEO down to our culinary workers — everybody wants to be involved in the Epic project,” she added.
While some smaller organizations contract with larger health systems for Epic via the Community Connect program, Mount Nittany Health decided to go it alone.
“Our community leaders and providers felt strongly that we needed to be able to drive our own utilization and deployment of the software in ways that best benefit our patients,” Dr. Hunt said. “Working directly with Epic … puts us in the driver’s seat, ensuring our solution meets the needs as we define them.”
Mount Nittany Health plans to adopt Epic’s entire suite of AI products when it goes live, and may be an early adopter for the EHR vendor’s new ambient AI scribe. Dr. Hunt said that while she isn’t sure of the exact pricing of some of Epic’s recently unveiled AI tools, what she’s seen so far has been “very economical and made a lot of sense for our organization.”
“We’re just really excited to see what we can do in the future with having the right technology at our team’s fingertips,” she said. “We’re really looking forward to automating some of their processes, getting rid of some of the workarounds so they can really focus on what’s most important — which is that patient sitting in front of them.
“Our patients are going to benefit from better access, communication and care tools across the board. We’re really excited to be able to have some data at our fingertips to make decisions, to look at opportunities to reduce variations in care and really just improve our quality of care across the system overall.”
