Gillette, Wyo.-based Campbell County Health is switching to an Epic EHR to improve provider and patient satisfaction and boost revenue cycle functionality.
The rural health system is connecting to Aurora, Colo.-based UCHealth’s Epic EHR on July 19. The implementation will cost over $6 million, paid to UCHealth through 2029. Campbell County Health was previously on several different EHRs, with some departments still using paper.
“The benefit for our staff is not having to look in multiple different systems, not having to scan documents into different systems,” Campbell County Health CEO Matt Shahan told Becker’s. “And ultimately, that’s going to have the biggest impact on our patients as well, is that everything is tied in. As you know, Epic is a very large, widely used system, so having the ability to have records from a visit to Colorado or to Rapid City (S.D.), or to any other facility that has Epic, is going to be a huge benefit for our staff and our patients alike.”
Campbell County Health started looking into upgrading its EHR about 4 1/2 years ago. The $425 million health system — which has a 90-bed hospital and nearly 20 medical clinics — considered staying with Meditech or going to Cerner (now called Oracle Health).
But Epic seemed to be the best fit. UCHealth was the nearest health system that had an opening in its Community Connect program, which was a less expensive option for Campbell County Health than contracting with Epic directly or upgrading its Meditech EHR.
“Our medical staff and those staff members who had worked elsewhere, the majority of them had either used Epic in their residency program or knew about Epic,” Mr. Shahan said. “We’ve also struggled for years with our revenue cycle processes. We know the impact that Epic can have to improve your rev cycle.”
The health system originally planned to go live with Epic in 2023 but the pandemic and executive turnover scuttled that plan. The organization pushed the date back again to make changes to its revenue cycle operations. Its nursing home and home health arm will remain on separate EHRs.
Campbell County Health works with a project team from UCHealth on the implementation. UCHealth will offer two weeks of 24-hour support after the go-live. UCHealth staffers have been on site for some of the process but have mostly helped out remotely.
The Wyoming health system will have dedicated over 9,000 staff hours to the rollout, including about 60 “super” users. Campbell County Health outsourced its Meditech EHR work in the meantime but decided to keep the Epic implementation in-house, in part for financial reasons.
“Our staff has done a fantastic job of continuing to see patients and doing all of the day-to-day operations and somehow still fitting in all of these Epic meetings for a little over three years,” Mr. Shahan said.
The health system will cut back to about 50% scheduling capacity during the first week of go-live and 75% the second before returning to normal.
“The implementation process has actually gone really smoothly, and even so much lately that we’ve been hearing from staff: ‘Can we just tear the Band-Aid off and go live?'” Mr. Shahan said. “And you don’t hear that in all implementations. A lot of times there’s some hesitancy to move from what everybody knows.”
But the health system still has some last-minute items and training it is working through, and staffers are still discovering new workflows that will be helpful to know upon go-live.
“I can’t say enough about our staff throughout this project,” Mr. Shahan said. “We really relied on our staff, because they’re the day-to-day operators, and they have stepped up to the challenge. There was disappointment, of course, when we decided to delay the project but everybody understood the why. And now we’ve got everybody on board, and we’re ready to go live.”
