I worked at Epic for 12 years and I'm a big fan of what they do to innovate their products to meet the needs of clinicians. However, no matter how good the Epic EMR software is, implementing an infinitely complex piece of software in an infinitely complex industry brings with it many short-comings.
A few that I saw the most during my tenure at Epic were:
- A tendency to "replace" the paper chart rather than improving it, resulting in far too little discrete information and far too many scanned documents. Pathology results, radiology results, outside records, and many other types of documents that contain mission-critical clinical data for patients are languishing in Chart Review and the Media Tab. Not searchable. Not able to contribute to real-time decision support. Often not even labeled correctly!
- Not being able to give the specialties the attention they need, resulting in inadequate workflows and a complete lack of discrete data (both historical and ongoing) that tends to be far more important to specialty nurses and doctors. Specialties tend to be the biggest closet users of retired systems, paper, and spreadsheets for this reason.
- A LOT of paper. Lots and lots of paper. It's the elephant in the hospital. And the clinic. Paper is still flying around like you wouldn't believe. A single department at a very reputable HIMSS Stage 7 hospital that uses our software receives an average of 665 faxed documents PER DAY.
Over 75% of the organizations
using our healthcare software
are integrating it with Epic.
Is it hard to integrate with Epic? Absolutely not! Epic speaks the same language as we do by using industry standards. You will notice that Epic & Extract go together like peanut butter and jelly.
By bolting our application into your Epic EMR workflows, you'll notice a few things:
- Chart review will become a breath of fresh air! Documents will be split out by document type, labeled appropriately, and even searchable by key information within them. The term "Media Tab" will no longer be a 4 letter world to your entire organization.
- You'll never have to use Enter/Edit Results again! Because we do the work of pulling the discrete results out of the documents and displaying them to users in our easy-to-use software. Ultimately filing the data into Epic using an electronic interface allowing you to completely bypass the process of discretely typing in the results and scanning thesource image.
- You'll be CLIA compliant! Your labs will be filed discretely with units, reference ranges, abnormal flags, and a direct link to the source document.
- Your internal AND external results will be pleasantly trendable in Results Review, Synopsis, Review Flowsheets, and print groups everywhere! They can be trended on the same row or separated out to their own rows based on Epic configuration.
- This one will shock you and you won't be able to stop thinking of ways to use the product throughout your organization! Reach out to us to learn more!
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About the Author: Rob Fea
Rob Fea spent 12 years partnering with IT teams and clinicians at major hospitals and clinics worldwide during his tenure on the technical services team at Epic. Rob supported Epic's Phoenix product, playing a major role in project kickoffs, installation, data conversions, ongoing support, and optimization. Rob watched the Phoenix customer base expand from 0 to 55 live and installing transplant organizations. This experience gave Rob expansive insight into the healthcare world, especially the solid organ transplant industry. Rob has spent countless hours on the floor in transplant departments observing multidisciplinary visits, committee review meetings, data entry, data trending, reporting, medication dosing, and more.