Buffalo, N.Y.-based Kaleida Health went live with Epic across all of its acute and ambulatory sites May 30, retiring 13 legacy EHRs in a single “big bang” transition rather than a phased rollout.
Before Epic, Kaleida Health ran a mix of EHR platforms, including Athenahealth, Medent, Meditech and Oracle Health.
The consolidation was roughly 18 months in the making. Kaleida dedicated about 200 employees full time to the Epic project, and Courtney Starnes, CIO of Kaleida Health, credited a disciplined governance structure with keeping the timeline on track.
“One of the things I would say that we really leaned into, and I think it was a differentiator for us, was our governance structure,” she told Becker’s. “It helped us to be able to move fast. Without that strong governance, our implementation, and then our future optimization, would be fragmented.”
Now, the health system is focused on working toward stabilization. Kaleida built the transition around close alignment with Epic’s standard build, known as Epic Foundation.
“We were able to deliver a really well-functioning Epic system that is highly aligned to Epic Foundation, or 98% in alignment with the Epic Foundation system,” Ms. Starnes said. “We really do look at our new EHR as a platform, not just a system, something that is really a foundation for the strategies that we expect to employ and the digital transformation that we continue to do for our community.”
Kaleida is also opting for an Epic-first strategy and is using the EHR go-live to introduce Epic’s AI starter kit tools directly into clinical workflows in a bid to give its staff more time to provide care to its patients, rather than on documentation.
“We believe very strongly at Kaleida that healthcare is a person business,” she said. “It’s a person-centered business, and we really need to be focused on our employees and the patients.”
The health system is already looking to optimize the platform further, with its first Epic upgrade scheduled for September.
“We’re already looking at how we optimize the system with those upgrades, and then we are also going live, bringing two Community Connect sites onto our platform in October,” she said.
Those two sites are Buffalo-based Erie County Medical Center Corp. and the University at Buffalo.
It is early, and Ms. Starnes acknowledged Kaleida’s care teams are still adjusting to the new system a month after go-live. But she pointed to one early sign of the platform giving time back to clinicians.
“One of our CMOs mentioned to me that he felt like already, just in week two, he was getting about 13 minutes back in the day as he was rounding on patients,” Ms. Starnes said. “That’s a small start, but that’s just week two, and we’re going to continue to build on that.”
Looking ahead, Ms. Starnes said Kaleida does not view the Epic EHR install as a finished project but as the start of a continuous cycle of upgrades and refinement.
“Optimization is a whole discipline in and of itself,” she said. “It’s not just a phase that we’ll go through in a year and then finish and move on to the next thing. It’s our continuous operating model as we move forward.”
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