St. Charles’ new $79.5 million record system going online

St. Charles Health System announced Monday it is going live next Saturday with a new electronic health record system and bringing a new online portal to its patients, a project two years and nearly $80 million in the making.

The transition will bring the health system’s four hospitals and family care, immediate care and specialty care clinics under the same umbrella for patient records, care delivery processes, registration and billing, according to the news release from the region’s largest employer (at 4,200 employees)

“The benefits of Epic will be felt throughout Central Oregon,” said Joe Sluka, president and CEO of St. Charles Health System. “The improvement in the quality and coordination of patient care are a long-term investment in the health of our community.”

The new patient portal, MyChart, will enable St. Charles patients to access their health records online or through a mobile application, view test results, book appointments with family care clinics and pay bills online. St. Charles is also piloting an “e-visit” program at its family care clinic in Prineville, as well as self-check-in tablets at three pilot sites.

In the long-term, St. Charles said it plans to leverage Epic to serve its mission of “creating America’s healthiest community, together.” The health system will track performance indicators to measure the efficiency of the system and impact on patient care.

“Epic brings us all onto the same page across the system and gives us access to data and tools that will serve population health improvement,” said Dr. Jim Guyn, St. Charles’ vice president of population health. “Empowering patients with the MyChart patient portal and improving communication across the system gives us more opportunity for innovation and patient-centered care.”

As for the cost, St. Charles Public Information Officer Lisa Goodman said, ” Our budget for this project is $79.5 million and we are running slightly under budget.”

In addition to improving communication across the health system, Epic will improve communication among providers across the country, the health system said.

Epic is one of the most widely used interoperability platforms at large hospitals, allowing patients’ medical data to move with them wherever they’re seen for care. This means visitors to Central Oregon can pull information from their home clinics, and those clinics can in turn pull information from St. Charles.

The health system has spent the final few months of its Epic implementation preparing operations for the changes in process that the new EHR brings.

The Epic implementation team at St. Charles is a collaboration between IT, operations and support services, along with consultants who have prior experience with Epic go-lives.

The project kicked off in September 2016 with an analysis of current processes at St. Charles. More than 300 St. Charles caregivers weighed in on the workflows they will be using at go-live and opted to transition to Epic’s “Foundation System” of best practices in more than 90 percent of cases.

Preparing to change and standardize processes across the entire system involved hundreds of hours of “operational readiness” planning and practicing.

“Our caregivers will change the way they do their work on April 7,” said Iman Simmons, chief operating officer at St. Charles. “When we follow evidence-based standard work in every department at every facility, we enhance patient safety and the quality of care. Epic gives us more tools to support continuous improvement and do what is best for our patients and community.”