Minot, N.D.-based Trinity Health anticipates a return on investment of nearly $1 billion from implementing Epic, its IT chief told Becker’s.
The two-hospital system signed a deal for the new EHR in June with a go-live date of Nov. 1, 2026. Despite the “major” spending the project will entail, Trinity Health expects a return of at least $5 million to $6 million a year alone from consolidating over 400 applications to less than 200, as well as more workflow automations, redundancy reductions and efficiency gains.
“What we did is we looked at every process that would be impacted by implementing Epic,” said Trinity Health CIO John McDaniel. “Over a 10-year period of time, it was close to $1 billion, either savings, revenue recovery or revenue generation.”
Mr. McDaniel, a health IT consultant, said he was previously “not an Epic fan” but the company turned him into a believer. He initially expected Trinity Health to go with Meditech or Oracle Health, the other two vendors it considered for an enterprise EHR (the health system currently uses Oracle Health for inpatient and Altera Digital Health for ambulatory care and revenue cycle management), but was won over by the comprehensiveness and sophistication of Epic, including its growing AI capabilities.
“I won’t say it should be chosen 100% of the time, but I would be willing to go out on a limb and say every organization really should consider Epic in their evaluation process,” he said. “If nothing else, it offers great insights as to where healthcare is going and a platform that would get you there.”
At first, he thought the roughly $500 million health system would be too small for Epic, which is the top choice of large hospital networks and academic medical centers. But Trinity Health reached out to Epic — the company doesn’t “sell” to health systems in the traditional sense; you have to call them — and the vendor agreed to a demo.
“They would probably argue with me on this, but they own the big market, so if you’re going to grow, where are you going to grow?” Mr. McDaniel noted. “I actually jokingly said that to them. They said, ‘No, we do not market. We do not sell.’ I understand their philosophy, but if you’re going to attract new customers, you’ve got to start to look at markets this size.”
In fact, Epic has been expanding its lead among health systems with two to 10 hospitals in recent years, according to KLAS Research.
Mr. McDaniel also said the “cost has gone down,” making Epic more affordable for smaller organizations. “I won’t say they negotiated, but they negotiated more than I thought they would,” he said.
“I did not want this to be a John McDaniel recommendation. So we put together a really large group of individuals made up of clinicians, physicians, allied health professionals and others to participate in the evaluation,” Mr. McDaniel said. “At the end of the day, it was a 98% agreement throughout the entire organization that Epic was our choice.”
Trinity Health also decided to contract with Epic directly rather than a large health system (via the company’s Community Connect program) to retain control over the EHR’s configuration and because it wouldn’t have been much cheaper, Mr. McDaniel said. The health system may act as a Community Connect site for critical access hospitals in North Dakota.
In addition, the health system plans to be an early adopter of Epic’s Teamwork staff scheduling platform and join its Cosmos research network, which includes data on 300 million unique patients spanning nearly two-thirds of the EHR company’s clients.
“I’ve worked with all these vendors in the past numerous times, and I never got a sense that they considered, or would even be in a position to suggest strongly, that we share data with other hospitals that were their customers,” Mr. McDaniel said. “That’s one of the things Epic does extremely well: They enable and facilitate sharing of data so I can benchmark myself against other hospitals of comparable size.”
The project team includes 65 to 70 consultants and Trinity Health team members, including physicians, nurses, allied health, clinical informaticists and analysts, as well as 10 to 15 Epic staffers. With the “two-in-a-box” model, a consultant or Epic employee will be paired with each Trinity associate, Mr. McDaniel said. The implementation officially kicked off Nov. 10.
“If there’s any downside at all, it’s just we can’t get there fast enough,” Mr. McDaniel said.
