UT Health Austin (Texas) intends to go live with a new inpatient Epic EHR on the same day it opens its new multibillion-dollar academic medical center.
With the net-new implementation, the health system will be able to easily adopt many of the vendor’s latest AI and automation features.
“It is a really unique opportunity to build this from scratch, from the ground up,” UT Health Austin CIO Michael Ryan told Becker’s. “We’re really taking a fresh-eyes look at it. … We don’t have many existing legacy processes or legacy ways of working.”
The $2.5 billion University of Texas at Austin Medical Center, slated to break ground in 2026, will include a new UT hospital and MD Anderson Cancer Center. Austin is currently the largest American city without an academic medical center.
UT Health Austin now operates an ambulatory practice with an Athenahealth EHR but is transitioning that to Epic in April. The full EHR will roll out once the UT Health Austin hospital opens by 2030.
He said the EHR vendor was a strategic and logical choice because of its strong reputation among academic medical centers and use by other University of Texas System hospitals.
“We will apply automation and AI right out of the gate, because we don’t have an existing operation and infrastructure that we need to transition,” he said.
The project team includes about 30 internal and 45 external staffers and started preimplementation planning in 2024, setting up governance and third-party integrations. UT Health San Antonio, which opened a new hospital in December 2024, is assisting with Epic support.
Mr. Ryan expects safety, quality, efficiency and patient experience benefits from the new EHR, as well as stronger data and analytics to support education, research and practice growth.
“This is a foundational element to our overall academic medical center build,” he said. “We’re paying a lot of attention to get this right upfront, because it’s the foundation we’re building a lot of other capabilities on. We’re looking forward to joining the rest of UT System healthcare institutions leveraging Epic to serve our patients.”
