Mayo Clinic has started the process of moving to a single, integrated electronic health record (EHR) and billing system with the implementation of Epic at its Mayo sites in Wisconsin—a $1.5 billion dollar effort in total, according to reports.
According to an announcement from the Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic, some of the organization’s health system sites in Wisconsin recently began implementing the technology from Epic, which is based in Verona, Wisconsin itself. Those Wisconsin sites, according to a report in the Post Bulletin, are La Crosse, Onalaska, Prairie du Chien and Sparta, all of which shifted to a new system to manage its more than 200,000 patient records.
Mayo Clinic Health System sites in Minnesota are scheduled to go live in November 2017, followed by Mayo Clinic’s Rochester campus in May 2018 and Mayo Clinic’s campuses in Arizona and Florida in October 2018. More than 51,000 Mayo staff will be trained to use the new system, officials said.
Known internally as the Plummer Project, this initiative builds on the legacy of Henry Plummer, M.D., who created the world’s first patient-centered health record at Mayo Clinic more than a century ago, according to Mayo officials.
In 2015, Mayo made big news when it chose Epic to roll out its EHR and RCM systems, which at the time were combined under competitors Cerner Corp. and General Electric. Now, once Epic is in place across Mayo, patients and providers will have the information they need from one system—this includes medications, allergies and health issues. And, all future billing will be done through one system, meaning patients will receive one consolidated statement—no matter where at Mayo they are seen, according to officials.
“Having an integrated electronic health record across all of our sites can help us with our core mission of meeting patient needs,” Steve Peters, M.D., chief medical information officer (CMIO), Mayo Clinic, said in a statement. “It’s taking the best practices of Mayo Clinic to benefit all patients at all sites— converging on a common set of tools and bringing the best of Mayo Clinic to each patient’s care.”
Mayo’s CIO, Christopher Ross, told the Post Bulletin that most of the estimated $1.5 billion expense for this project will be for “staff involved in complex design decisions and configuring the Epic software to meet Mayo's specific needs.” Meanwhile, only a portion of the money will go toward the EHR and revenue cycle replacement, the report noted.
