Maine Medical Center, a 606-bed tertiary care and teaching hospital, part of the seven-hospital MaineHealth System, has begun a 20-month roll out of a new $90 million electronic health record system.
The Epic system, which replaces Maine Med’s Eclipsys system, will match up with the ambulatory systems that are rolling out now in MaineHealth’s owned and affiliated medical practices.
“We anticipate our providers with MMC privileges will continue to have secure access to relevant inpatient clinical data,” said Greg McCarthy, vice president of information services and health plan operations at Martin’s Point Health Care, a Portland, Maine-based multi-specialty practice. “Additionally, MMC and Martin’s Point Health Care are pilot members of HealthInfonet (HIN) and hope to continue to increase the amount of clinical data available for secure exchange among our providers.”
It made sense to select Epic for inpatient, also, said MaineHealth CIO Barry Blumenfeld.
Rather than a best-of-breed approach that many CIOs espoused in years past, most now see more merit in a single vendor approach. Blumenfeld is amond them.
“The end-user interface stays consistent across all venues including ambulatory and inpatient, and the information that’s in the repository is integrated in a way that only a single database can do,” he said.
The goal, said Blumenfeld, is to have a more integrated workflow, a more integrated presentation and more integrated data set.
“This also helps, by the way, when we start to talk about measuring the quality that we deliver and population health efforts – making sure people get their flu shot or making sure everyone gets aspirin after a myorcardial infarction,” he said. “Those things are greatly aided by our ability to capture all the data in one big bucket and then analyze it to improve the care we deliver.”
“We found that Epic has a great reputation and ranks high on things like the KLAS rating and generally receives very high marks from the other systems that have adopted them in recent years,” Blumenfeld said.
Epic is the only vendor in a report published in August by research firm KLAS with high ratings for money's worth, contracting and costs - and Epic projects have the largest scope of any vendor, according to the author of the report and KLAS founder Kent Gale.
The idea is to have all seven MaineHealth hospitals working on the Epic platform. Today, Maine Med is using Eclipsys, while the other, smaller hospitals across rural parts of the state are using various versions of Meditech. The Eclipsys system has worked well for Maine Med, but at the time Maine Med was choosing a new system, Eclipsys, which recently merged with Allsripts, did not have a good option for the ambulatory side, Blumenfeld said.
The Maine Medical Center Board of Directors has already approved the project for its hospitals, and, as Blumenfeld put it, Maine Med is in “start-up mode.” The other hospitals in the MaineHealth system have to make their own decisions and the MaineHealth Board will vote on either Nov. 4 or Dec. 2. “All of our member facilities would like to move in this direction,” said Blumenfeld. “It’s also true that it’s expensive and each board has to weigh in on it. They’ll be doing that over the next month and a half.”
Showing meaningful use is “a complicated dance.” In the case of Maine Medical Center, it will wait until it’s moved to the Epic System. By Maine Med figures it still will be eligible for about $35 million in federal incentives, reducing the estimated $90M technology cost.
“It’s $35 million, and that’s not chicken feed,” he said.
There will be other savings, too, derived from avoided costs – “interfaces we don’t have to create or upgrades that we don’t have to do.”
Since most of the MaineHealth hospitals will not be moving to the Epic System until 2013, they will upgrade their Meditech system and apply for the first round of incentives.
MaineHealth would be looking at a technology initiative with or without federal incentives, Blumenfeld, said.
“This was a vision and a mission that we were already headed toward at Maine Health and at Maine Medical Center. Availabilty of ARRA incentives – certainly focused our efforts and probably accelerated them somewhat.
“Despite ARRA, despite accountable care, despite payment reform, the motivating factor here is for a patient to be able to walk into any MaineHealth facility and know that they’re known to that facility and know that their doctor has access to all their information whether it’s medication, whether it’s allergies, whether it’s problems. It’s to improve the quality of care that they’re going to get in the future.”
