An EPIC Switch: Preparing for an Electronic Health Record Transition at Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Excerpt

The Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), in Nashville, Tennessee is among the nation’s premier teaching hospitals serving a large geographic area that includes Middle Tennessee, southern Kentucky and northern Alabama. Anchored by a 1000-bed general medical and surgical facility, VUMC provides nearly 2000,000 patient visits each year at 120 clinic and outpatient sites with its staff of 19,600 individuals. In 2015, Vanderbilt made a decision to transition to the electronic health record (EHR) system developed by Epic Systems Corporation (Verona, Wisconsin) for all of its core clinical information system needs – including ambulatory, inpatient, billing, and provider order entry. Plans were made to implement all of Epic in a “big bang” model with a go-live date of November 2nd 2017. To make this transition a success, VUMC recognized a need to simultaneously move away from its home grown culture and internally developed systems to processes that were more in keeping with industry standards. This would in turn allow VUMC to enter into a more sustainable support model and ensure the medical center was able to continue to use certified electronic health record technology as required by U.S. federal incentive programs. …