RWJBH Doctor Harnesses the Power of Epic

“Traditionally, hospitals have treated their clinical information as a protected resource, available only to those lucky enough to be inside the bubble,” said Dr. Covit. “Having immediate access to patient records across multiple facilities in a geographic region through Epic is unprecedented and revolutionary.”

What is the ultimate goal of change? It is often to achieve stability for the greater good. However, change itself requires periods of instability – this is the paradigm of change. Said differently, change is messy. Change is overlapping and unpredictable – perhaps nothing could have demonstrated this more than the outbreak of COVID-19 occurring just after we kicked off our Epic Together journey.

Epic Together is a force to be reckoned with.  Since the March 13, 2020 COVID-19 shutdown, this project has bucked all odds: increasing productivity by 43% and remaining on track for implementation, while so many other healthcare organizations hit the pause button.

Specialists Training Specialist (STS) is an Epic training program which uses staff physicians to train their colleagues on Epic workflow and documentation.

The role of operational workgroups transitions over the lifecycle of the Epic project. During the early Workflow & Configuration phase the project, the workgroups focused on decision-making: design decisions, content decisions, and risk/issue identification.

“One Patient, One Record” is critical to quality care and a successful Epic implementation. With that in mind, RWJBH is implementing a long-term plan that will maintain a duplicate rate of less than 3%, a gold standard in the healthcare field.

Epic’s Gold Stars program helps RWJBarnabas Health’s Epic Together project improve clinical and financial outcomes.

Drawn from the experiences of industry peers, Gold Stars provides a snapshot of the Epic Together current system and feature usage, based on overall adoption of Gold Star feature items.

RWJBarnabas Health’s Epic implementation is already producing enterprise-wide savings. A recent decommissioning of an obsolete mainframe application/database will save about $200,000 per year in maintenance and support costs alone.

As the Epic Together team completed an important milestone, the completion of the Wave 4 Build in July 31st of 2020, RWJBarnabas Epic Together project leadership recognized the tremendous efforts taken by the team to reach yet another goal.