Forbes Hospital in Monroeville, Pa., is set to go live April 11 on Epic's EHR system.
The 319-bed hospital will be the first in the Allegheny Health Network to implement Epic's system. Up until the launch date, the hospital has worked entirely on paper and will launch immediately into the Epic system with limited access to old patient records, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
The rest of the system will follow, starting with either Allegheny General Hospital or West Penn Hospital, both located in Pittsburgh. The current information system makes it difficult for the growing number of locations in the Allegheny Health Network to communicate and share records on an interoperable platform, both which Epic will enable, according to the report.
Once the whole system is live on Epic, which should be complete within a year, all providers will have access to a master patient index. Allegheny Health Network is also overhauling its medical device architecture to ensure that the devices, such as the MRI machine at Forbes, communicate with the central data host, according to the report.