What is Epic? According to their website, Epic is a private and employee-owned company that “makes software for mid-size and large medical groups, hospitals and integrated healthcare organizations - working with customers that include community hospitals, academic facilities, children’s organizations, safety net providers and multi-hospital systems.” The core of Epic’s kernel is based off of on an antiquated programming language known as MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-programming system) which was invented by a founder from rival Meditech in 1968. They [EPIC] have developed systems to seamlessly transition the state of medical records from a paper driven environment to a virtual environment. Epic allows …show more content…
Epic is looked upon as a status symbol within the healthcare arena, and that vantage point is further proven when you client base consists of the higher echelon healthcare providers in the industry such as Cleveland Clinic, John Hopkins, and the UC system almost in its entirety. Epic is not an inexpensive system to obtain. The decision for Kaiser Permanente to make the major system change came with a hefty price tag of $4 Billion dollars. With Kaiser having a footprint of more than 200 hospitals, it can be estimated that each facility spent about $20 Million for the system. Even with Kaiser doing a comparative cost study between Epic and rival Cerner, “doctors and nurses voted overwhelmingly for Epic.” Sutter healthcare system acquired Epic for 5 of their largest facilities spending over 500 million. Duke University Healthcare system spent over $700 Million, Partners Healthcare, based out of Boston, spent the nearly the same amount as Duke Healthcare system. The University of California, San Francisco, shelled out over $150 million. Given the aforementioned examples it is clear to see that Epic comes with a steep price tag. In terms of competition, Kansas City based Cerner is a major competitor. KLAS research provided a report, “Clinical Market Share 2013: More than Meaningful Use, “showing that Verona, Wisconsin based Epic has the most new hospitals (47) for the fifth year in a
I have personally worked with the EPIC EMR before in my clinical rotations. In general, I really like the Epic EMR system because it’s not that difficult to use. One of its advantages is that it has allowed me to easily access laboratory values, and general patient information when I need to look up a patient. Also, I can access clinical notes made by other physicians involved in the care of my patient, having instant access to this information is invaluable. The use of an EMR helps to reduce medical errors by utilizing computerized prescription entry, predicting drug interactions and displaying a warning for the health-care provider, assisting clinicians in reconciling patient medications, and most important, maintaining a detailed and legible
As a managed care organization Kaiser Permanente has served as a model for informational healthcare systems and the recent demand for affordable care has prompted the organization to lower cost in services without hindering the quality of care. Kaiser Permanente has integrated a system in which the organization assumes all financial risk and a bundled enrollment fee for service strategy. What makes Kaiser Permanente unique from other HMOs is their accountability for quality, utilization management, financial risk, and business strategies (Kaiser Permanente, 2009).
In early 2011 Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin (CHW) informed it patients and the general public that it would be fully immersed in another version of the electronic health record system, EPIC, by the completion of the 2012-2013 fiscal year. With so many hospital, clinic, and community locations, the hospital needed to implement the system in phases and fully engage thousands of
One reason that Providence won this award is the fact that they have a single instance of Epic installed system wide. It should be noted that Providence and Swedish, although merged, do operate on two different instances of Epic EHR. In order to transition to a single instance of Epic the cost would be $30 million, compared to a $500,000 interface that connects the two systems (E. Cooper, personal communication, May 23, 2016).
McKesson, now “the world’s largest health care services company,” has a combined customer base of about 5000 hospitals, 25,000 retail pharmacies, 35,000 physician practices, 10,000 extended care sites, 450 pharmaceutical manufactures, and 2000 medical-surgical manufacturers (Chicago tribune 1998). Mckesson has a 13.2% market share of the Health Information Technology industry and employs roughly 37,000 people. Mckesson’s hospital information system solutions includes their electronic health record system (HER, Total Coordinated Care product suite, InterQual Decision support products,
To improve the performance, there need to be upgrades with the systems that the hospital uses to keep track of the patients information. I recommend using Epic as a tool to help keep all of the patient’s information confidential and easy to access with a click of a button. This will allow for every department to have access to a certain patient’s file whether to be from a doctor entering notes about the patient’s visit, to health insurance billing department making sure that copays and such are being paid and their accounts are kept up-to-date. The hospital governance plays an important role because of the need for funds to help keep the hospital. By providing more outside events to raise money for the hospital will be a great start to being able to fully provide for each patient that comes through Middlefield Hospital doors.
There has been discussion to have universal healthcare system similar to Medicare as a method to have a centralized monitoring system of cost. There have also been other systems tried beginning with HMOs in the 1970s in an effort to streamline access to necessary healthcare services by employing a gatekeeper to their access at the primary care levels. With patient dissatisfaction, PPOs were tried which circumvent the necessity of referrals (Hacker, 1998). Either of these models had substantial effect on healthcare outcomes while the cost of healthcare continued to skyrocket. The US spends more than any other country on healthcare but outcomes are not better (Blackstone, 2016). In 2010, under President Obama’s leadership, Affordable Care Act was passed and one of the promising features is the formation of accountable care
Our one hundred bed hospital is in need of updating from paper charting to computerized health records. In doing this, we will meet our goal of compliance with meaningful use legislation. We assembled a team of members to assist with this task and together we have narrowed the search to two health care systems. Those two systems are EPIC and Meditech and we will now discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each, with a final recommendation for our new healthcare system.
Epic is a single integrated system for the clinical and business functions of health care provision that include registration, scheduling, and billing. The system is owned by Epic Systems, formerly Episodic Care, a large provider of HIT (health information technology) and is mainly utilized by health providers in accessing, systematizing, storing, and distributing EMR’s. Epic Systems is an independent firm in Verona, Wisconsin with a vast campus. Epic is useful in streamlining regulatory compliance, clinical workflow, quality care, the patient experience, and clinical documentation. This is a reflection of the
I’m glad to hear that your hospital is getting the Epic network. We have had both negative and positive experiences with the Epic system. Much of the frustration had to do with the way applications were set up and needing time to learn new system. On the hand, electronic documentation has enhanced communication between clinicians including nurses. Also, electronic documentation reduces medical errors and improves patient care. Although electronic documentation has improved nurse’s communication and efficeincy, it brought new terminologies that are specific to electronic documentation. These terminologies are standardized and require nurses to learn and use accurately (Sewell, 2016).
can you think of other healthcare facilities that created a demand for better technology and more availability?
Since most specialty procedures are inpatient services, EMC’s inpatient occupancy rate suffers. The occupancy rate for Emanuel Medical Center – fifty percent – is far below that of its competitors and industry benchmarks. To accompany this, EMC (on average) receives a lower reimbursement for in-patient Medicare services per patient seen in comparison to its competitors. A result such as this is correlated with directly to the fewer amount of specialty services that EMC offers. In order for Emanuel Medical Center to be able to compete with other hospitals in its service area, it is imperative that EMC evaluates what services they currently offer and are capable to offer in the future to add value to the hospital, increase its revenue stream, and expand its patient mix. Currently, Emanuel Medical Center has not succumbed to its increasing financial pressurealthough EMC has had a negative operating income for five straight years. A negative operating income places EMC at a disadvantage because it limits the hospitals ability to renovate its aging building or hire new specialists to offer revenue enhancing procedures. EMC’s competitors, on the other hand, have large sources of revenue due to their mergers with large healthcare networks such as Catholic Healthcare West. Another competitor, Kaiser Permanente Modesto Medical Center, has extremely large financial resources due to the fact
They electronic medical record being evaluated are Cerner and EPIC. The multidisciplinary committee will determine which program meets the needs of the 100 bed hospital.
Kaiser Permanente offers a holistic health care system by combining a nonprofit insurance plan with its own hospitals and clinics. Additionally, since the plan pays a fixed amount for medical care per member, there is a considerable financial incentive to keep people healthy and out of the hospital. Kaiser oversees, administers and provides a comprehensive care for patients, ranging from providing screening and diagnosis to filling a prescription to running a hospital where the patients undergo surgery. This strategy of integration is at least 10 percent less expensive than other providers’ services (Abelson, 2013).
Since 1993, the Truven Health 100 Top Hospitals program has used both independent and objective research to guide hospital and health system performance. In this process, they analyze public data sources to compare hospitals to similar organizations. The 100 Top Hospitals program uses a balanced scorecard that incorporates public data, proprietary, peer-reviewed methodology and key performance metrics to arrive at an objective, independent analysis of hospital or health system performance. This research measures performance, organizational alignment, progress