PORT ANGELES — All systems are go for Olympic Medical Center’s switch to a digital record-keeping system, hospital commissioners learned this week.
After months of planning, the hospital and its satellite clinics will “go live” with Epic electronic health records at 5 a.m. Saturday.
“This is all hands on deck, everybody working,” said Eric Lewis, OMC chief executive officer, in a briefing to the elected board Wednesday.
“This week has been and will be busy — testing, building, finalizing the conversions and educating and training. Just lots going on this week to get ready
for Saturday.”
Inpatient data is being converted to the Epic system today. The old system — Meditech — will be shut down at midnight.
“We’re going to be on paper for about five hours, and then Epic will be switched on go-live at 5 a.m. Saturday morning,” Lewis said.
The single-database Epic system will make a patient’s medical charts available to health care providers throughout the region in real time.
Once the system is up and running, patients will be able to access their medical records through an online portal.
Epic also is used by OMC’s Seattle-based affiliate, Swedish Medical Center, and the majority of hospitals in Western Washington.
Providence Health & Services, a Swedish partner, is helping OMC, Jefferson Healthcare and several other hospitals convert to Epic this year.
“This is probably the biggest transition health care has gone through in my career in health care,” Lewis said.
“All over the country, people are converting from paper and unconnected systems to digital and connected systems.”
Jefferson Healthcare plans to go live with Epic on June 15.
“We’ve been progressing along well in our implementation and are looking forward to going live, and actually also looking forward to being able to share information with providers at OMC when that’s appropriate,” said John Nowak, project manager for Epic at Jefferson Healthcare.
Providence will have more than 100 programmers, analysts, tutors and other support staff working in a command center at OMC for the first two weeks of Epic implementation.
Daily briefings will be held to address the top 10 issues that came up the previous day.
“I am confident that if anything comes up, we’ll have the resources here to address it,” Lewis said.
All told, OMC has spent about $10 million on Epic software, the data conversion and associated hardware. It also hired temporary workers to relieve permanent staff during training.
The investment will be offset by federal incentives that kick in this summer: OMC will be eligible for $7.2 million from Medicare if it achieves a “meaningful use” of a certified electronic health record system by July.
Hospitals that fail to go digital will take a 1 percent cut in Medicare reimbursement in 2015, followed by a 2 percent reduction in 2016 and a 3 percent hit in 2017.
“I think we’re ready to go,” Lewis said.
“I knew it was going to be a lot of work, but this is actually going to be more work than I even thought. The medical staff has really rolled their sleeves up. We just have to do it.”
Although Forks Community Hospital has no plans of going to Epic, the critical-access hospital already is receiving meaningful-use payments because it has new modules of Meditech and Centricity, and is working with the Western Washington Rural Health Care Collaborative.
Forks Community Hospital Chief Executive Officer Bill McMillan said Epic is regarded as the Cadillac of health records.
“We’ve got a good Chevy system,” he said.
OMC’s Epic implementation team, led by director of diagnostic imaging Deby King, divided the hospital and various clinics into zones, each of which will have its own contingent of Providence support.
A “physician engagement center” is up and running in the hospital and will continue to run for at least a month.
With more than 1,100 workers, OMC is Clallam County’s largest employer.
Lewis said electronic health records “will really set Olympic Medical Center up for the coming five, 10, 20 years.”
“This is where we have to be,” he added, “and it’s exciting to be getting positioned for the future and creating a better future for health care in our community.”
Reporter Rob Ollikainen can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5072, or at rollikainen@peninsuladailynews.com.
