Future users help design improved system-wide Epic workflows

The Butterfly Initiative – a system-wide patient care and quality improvement initiative to integrate patient care across all WVU Medicine hospitals and clinics –  is flying forward toward the 2017 launch.

The catalyst for this transformation is the roll-out of the latest version of the Epic Electronic Health Record (EHR) to all WVU Medicine facilities. This will include upgrading sites currently using Epic to the latest version and transitioning sites currently using other systems to Epic by the end of 2017.

Ruby Memorial Hospital, Berkeley Medical Center, and Jefferson Medical Center, along with the clinics at United Hospital Center (UHC), will upgrade to a new version of Epic. UHC (hospital), St. Joseph’s Hospital, Potomac Valley Hospital, and Camden Clark Medical Center are gaining Epic for the first time.

Because various patient care providers will have different Epic needs, Information Technology (IT) experts behind the scenes asked for input from each aspect of care to achieve the ultimate goal of creating a system that makes it easier to provide better patient care.

The first round of workflow adoption sessions took place at the end of March. Care providers representing different aspects of patient care from all seven system hospitals gathered by web conference to provide perspective on what providers need from the Epic system.

More than 150 workflow adoption sessions took place over three days. They focused on admission and discharge, nursing documentation, medication administration, nuclear medicine, infusion visit preparation, billing, behavioral health, spiritual care, nursery and postpartum, IV team – and more.

Future sessions will review and refine the workflows until they are ready for functional testing this fall. Three additional rounds of sessions are planned for the spring and summer. Separate physician workflow sessions are to be determined.