In October 2018, Mayo Clinic achieved a historic milestone with the final Epic implementation in Florida and Arizona. The epic (pun intended) implementation of Epic across the Mayo Clinic’s network of 90 hospitals and clinics began in July 2017 when 24 of its sites in Wisconsin went live. Subsequently, campuses in Minnesota went live in November 2017, followed by Mayo’s Rochester facility in May 2018 and finally in Arizona and Florida.
The Epic EHR rollout at Mayo Clinic was dubbed the Plummer Project in honour of Henry Plummer, MD, who developed a patient-centred health record at Mayo in 1907.
While the movement to a single Epic EHR and revenue cycle management system to replace 3 separate EHR instances, multiple disparate revenue cycle systems and a total of 287 applications was impressive from a technical and execution standpoint, what was more impressive was the training of 51,000 Mayo Clinic employees to be onboard the Epic system. Mayo Clinic has a total of 65,000 employees of which 51,000 had to go through training in Epic as it was essential for their day-to-day duties and operations.
Dr. Steve Peters, co-chair of the Plummer Project, shared lessons learnt from the EHR rollout in a Mayo Clinic Radio video in July last year:
“We’ve learn a lot from the earlier implementations – we’ve modified the training and made it more focused to the tasks or some of the scenarios that an individual needs. We’ve increased the number and the training of the super-users – those are individuals embedded in the practice whether it’s a physician, nurse or desk staff who help to understand the local workflow rather than just how they navigate the tool. We then fine-tune where more support would be needed and which types of workflows.
For example, moving from one setting to another from an outpatient to inpatient or emergency room to an interventional radiology procedure to the operating room, these are opposed kind of special challenges where we can focus some of the training and some of the build-up of Epic so that it is more easily done.”
Dr. Patrick H. Luetmer, chair of Clinical Systems Oversight for Mayo Clinic, responsible for governance of the converged Epic electronic health record and of clinical departmental systems will be at the HIMSS Singapore eHealth & Health 2.0 Summit on April 24 2019 to share about the key lessons learnt from the massive EHR rollout.
In particular, Dr. Luetmer will emphasise the importance of rigorous tracking of co-dependent projects and careful management of a separate team to support legacy systems prior to go lives.
Keen to explore more about the lessons learnt from the Plummer Project? Sign up here to enjoy early bird rates for the upcoming HIMSS Singapore eHealth & Health 2.0 Summit held from April 23-24 2019!