Springfield, Ill.-based Memorial Health plans to consolidate three EHRs to Epic in the first quarter of 2027, bringing on a large Community Connect partner at the same time.
The new EHR will be installed by a team of 97 people, including about 30 consultants, and cost roughly $105 million.
Years ago, Memorial Health investigated moving its five hospitals to Cerner (now Oracle Health) and leaving its clinics on TouchWorks (from Altera Digital Health), but put the decision on hold during the pandemic. Coming out of COVID-19, the health system reevaluated.
“There was a desire to find a platform that is integrated for acute care and ambulatory and integrated for clinical and billing processes,” Suresh Krishnan, senior vice president and CIO of Memorial Health, told Becker’s. “In the market, there are not many choices when you are putting those constraints in place. Epic is one of the very few platforms that can do all of that. So picking Epic is an obvious choice in this case.”
Memorial Health is starting the implementation this month and intends to go with Epic’s foundational EHR and a “big bang” all-at-once go-live. Its hospitals are currently on Oracle Health and TruBridge (formerly known as CPSI), while the health system will be streamlining four patient portals to one (MyChart).
A hurdle will be integrating Memorial Health’s biggest Community Connect partner, Springfield-based SIU Medicine, right off the bat. SIU, which has about 150 outpatient clinics, is already on the health system’s TouchWorks instance but will move to Epic on the same day Memorial does, along with two local orthopedic practices. Mr. Krishnan wants to make sure his collaborators are ready.
“I have done a lot of Epic implementations previously but never gone live with a large Connect partner on Day 1 — this will be a new challenge,” he said. “We don’t have much of a choice but to mitigate the risk and move on.”
Memorial Health is also subsidizing the Connect partners, so it isn’t a revenue-generating opportunity but more to promote interoperability in the region, Mr. Krishnan said.
The health system has big goals: to get close to eight Epic Gold Stars — the EHR vendor’s performance and adoption assessment program — right away for usage and implementation.
Memorial Health is also licensing Epic’s entire suite of AI tools, and Mr. Krishnan is looking forward to Epic’s ambient AI scribe, Nebula AI cloud platform, and AI for claims denials, coding and clinician inbox management.
“I’m a huge fan of AI, and I see a lot of value [for it] in healthcare,” he said.
In addition, the health system hopes to implement self-scheduling through MyChart and move about 30% of its IT environment to the cloud within two years, as it also upgrades its enterprise resource planning system.
“Every time a new EMR is implemented, I think adopting what is available at that time happens to be natural for most health systems, but keeping up is the challenge for a lot of health systems,” Mr. Krishnan said. “I would love to do twice-a-year upgrades and keep up with whatever is coming from Epic.”
