The University of Texas at Austin has rolled out Epic at its ambulatory practice.
The organization switched to the EHR at its outpatient clinic April 6 so Epic will be ready to go live on Day 1 at its new academic medical center, set to open by 2030.
“We wanted to grow our practice on this platform,” Michael Ryan, chief healthcare technology, digital and data strategist at UT Austin and chief administrative officer of Dell Medical School, told Becker’s. “We didn’t want to grow our practice and then transition to a new platform.”
Officials intend to break ground on the multibillion-dollar UT Dell Medical Center, which will be anchored by Dell Medical School and include a new UT hospital and an MD Anderson Cancer Center, later this year. Michael and Susan Dell recently surpassed $1 billion in donations to UT, while Nvidia investor and board member Tench Coxe and his wife, Simone, gave $100 million, to create an “AI-native” medical center.
“We’re really leaning into this idea of applying AI and automation right out of the gate,” Mr. Ryan said.
UT Austin licensed Epic’s suite of AI tools and deployed Abridge for ambient clinical documentation.
The organization also rolled out Workday for financial management, Kodiak for automation and revenue cycle, Experian for its clearinghouse, and Rackspace for data-center hosting.
“Internally, we call this project Project Cornerstone, because for us, it was a lot more than just the EHR,” Mr. Ryan said.
IT consulting firm Nordic helped with the Epic implementation, which included a team of about 100 people from UT Austin, Nordic and Epic.
UT Austin’s MyChart already has nearly 7,000 users, or almost 60% of its patient population. About 62% of patients have been using self-check-in on the patient portal, with an average registration time of less than 5 minutes and an average provider wait time of less than 13 minutes.
“We wanted to bring together a highly integrated set of technologies and capabilities right out of the gate,” Mr. Ryan said. “It’s really an investment for the future as much as it is for our current practice.”
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