Charleston, W.Va.-based Vandalia Health is moving its 16 hospitals and more than 220 ambulatory sites onto Epic, consolidating an EHR footprint that swelled to 27 systems during four years of rapid growth.
Vice President and CIO Daniel Stross told Becker’s his organization expects to sign its Epic contract in October, with a go-live planned for fall 2028.
“It’s a done deal,” Mr. Stross said.
Vandalia has grown from four hospitals to 16 over the past four years, Mr. Stross said, including two hospitals added in September, and has doubled its ambulatory sites. The organization had been working toward a single EHR throughout that expansion, but only six of its hospitals are on its primary platform. Ten of the 16 run on three separate instances of Oracle Health: two Oracle Health domains and one hospital on the vendor’s CommunityWorks platform. Across the enterprise, Vandalia now runs 27 EHRs.
The trigger for a broader rethink was the calendar.
“Our contract was approaching its expiration date with Oracle Health, and we said it’s just the right time to take a look at where we should be going with consolidating these EHRs,” Mr. Stross said. “We knew we’re going to have to make a heavy investment. Where should we put that investment?”
Vandalia evaluated multiple EHRs on clinical, revenue cycle and data analytics capabilities and ran a 10-year financial analysis.
The organization is not disclosing what the Epic investment will cost, but Mr. Stross said the analysis showed the project paying for itself.
“We believe that there will be a seven-year payback, so we’ll be able to recoup the entire investment that we’re making in Epic by Year 7,” he said. “After Year 7, our overall IT costs drop significantly. There are significant savings by getting onto a single Epic instance when it comes to all of our clinical applications.”
Cost was one factor among several. Mr. Stross pointed to Epic’s revenue cycle platform, which he said would help the health system get accurate claims out the door on time, and to the MyChart patient portal, which Vandalia plans to offer patients starting in 2028.
Once the contract is signed, Vandalia will spend five months planning, followed by an 18-month build, test and deploy phase. All 16 hospitals and more than 220 clinics will go live on the same day. The organization is taking on the vast majority of Epic’s applications and will start at level 9 of Epic’s Gold Stars program, which tracks adoption of Epic’s recommended configurations.
When the work is done, Vandalia will be down to Epic and a specialty radiation oncology EHR. Where Epic doesn’t yet offer a product, such as blood bank, the health system will use a third-party tool until Epic releases its own, Mr. Stross said. Vandalia will also replace the handful of ambient listening tools it now runs across its various EHRs with Epic’s.
“We believe in integrated solutions, and so we will be Epic first on all of our solutions,” he said.
That extends to AI. Asked whether usage-based pricing for Epic’s AI tools could become cost-prohibitive, Mr. Stross said Vandalia will weigh value but plans to adopt what Epic has available at go-live.
“Nobody has an endless budget for AI solutions, and so you really have to take a look at the value that they bring,” he said. “But we believe that the Epic AI solutions offer great value, and that’s why we plan to embrace the tools that are available in 2028.”
Vandalia plans to dedicate its entire IT team to the project, putting staff through extensive Epic training in 2027 and bringing in temporary workers to support legacy systems during the transition. The hospital network will also select an implementation partner, but Mr. Stross said the vast majority of the work will be done by retrained internal staff.
He said the response inside the organization has surprised him.
“Epic will tell you that these are not IT initiatives. These are health system initiatives, and there’s so much excitement. … I don’t have to drum up excitement. It’s there already, and I think we’re very well positioned to be able to have a successful go-live in 2028,” Mr. Stross said.
