Epic won two new major healthcare customers in the past week, as both Intermountain Healthcare and UPMC announced that they have decided to implement their electronic health records in the coming years.
WHY IT MATTERS
Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Health will transition to Epic by the end of 2025 as part of the move to a single EHR across the organization’s 33 hospitals and 385 clinics in seven states.
“This decision was made with input from thousands of physicians, advanced practice providers, nurses and EHR users across the organization, and supports Intermountain’s efforts to prioritize the provider and patient experience and simplify work,” said a spokesperson for Intermountain. a statement by email to Healthcare IT news.
Epic is currently in use at a number of Intermountain locations in Colorado and Montana. But the health system, a longtime Cerner customer, said the time is right to make a broader move to a single platform for all enterprises to streamline care delivery and enable cost savings.
The Cerner contract for the EPD deployed at Intermountain’s Utah facilities expires in November. Additionally, according to the statement, there is an “urgent need” to find new technology for supplier locations in Idaho and Nevada, where older systems need to be replaced.
Epic was chosen for “strong functional offerings and significantly higher physician and APP EHR satisfaction scores,” according to Intermountain. “For example, Epic EHR satisfaction scores at Intermountain are 0.49 points above the national average on a 5-point scale.”
The goal of the expanding healthcare system in the future is an EHR that “enables clinicians and healthcare providers to coordinate care across facilities and provide the best possible care to patients.”
At Pittsburgh-based UPMC – which already uses Epic for its outpatient care providers – the plan is to also transition its inpatient EHR within the next three years. Last week the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that the healthcare system expects a mid-2026 completion date for the move of approximately six million digital patient records from Oracle Cerner to Epic.
To meet that timeline, the 40-hospital system will reportedly deploy more than 600 IT professionals and 1,200 physicians to transition to a unified EHR, as well as new features for the Epic-based myUPMC patient portal.
Pittsburgh-based UPMC will transfer six million patient records from nine EHRs to Epic Systems, a task that will involve 600 information technology technicians and as many as 1,200 physicians, nurses, pharmacists and other clinicians. Post-Gazette reported on September 5.
The healthcare system uses Oracle Cerner for inpatient records and Epic for outpatient records. This move, expected to be completed by mid-2026, will put all patient records on one unified platform, giving healthcare providers faster access to a patient’s complete medical record.
“It’s not just a technology transfer, it’s truly transformative for the system,” Chris Carmody, UPMC’s chief technology officer, told the newspaper, noting that the move would allow for a significant reduction in the tens of millions of ADT messages generated by the system every day.
“This is all about the patient experience and the patient-physician relationship and removing any barriers in that relationship,” said UPMC Chief Information Officer Ed McCallister, “in a quote emailed to HITN.
“This is a technology-enabled clinical and operational transformation,” added Dr. Rob Bart, the health care system’s Chief Medical Information Officer, added.
THE BIG TREND
Intermountain first signed with Cerner in 2013 and was touted as one of the company’s top customers. It signed a multi-year extension and expansion with Cerner in 2020. Since then, it has continued its track record of technological innovations, from artificial intelligence to cybersecurity, including gaining the status of the world’s first triple Stage 7 organization, and recognition, last month, with A 2023 HIMSS Davies Award of Excellence.
Of course, UPMC has also been an IT leader for many years, as evidenced by recent HITN case studies on some of its virtual care and medication nonadherence initiatives, and our interview with its Chief Healthcare Data and Analytics Officer.
ON THE RECORD
“Our finance team has completed a detailed review of our annual EHR operating costs, and the move to a single platform will help us realize significant cost savings over time,” Intermountain leaders said in a statement e-mail sent to her doctors. “We have a lot of planning ahead of us to go live with Epic systemwide in Q4 2025.”
“It’s one of the most transformative activities we’ve had here at UPMC,” UPMC Chief Information Officer Ed McCallister told the Post-Gazette. “It’s going to have an impact on everyone. It’s the entire organization that’s going to move this forward.”
Mike Miliard is editor-in-chief of Healthcare IT News
Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS publication.