Laurel, Miss.-based South Central Regional Medical Center is spending about $115 million on a new Epic EHR over the next 10 years to boost data-sharing in its region, improve the patient experience and help with physician recruitment, executives told Becker’s.
The organization launched with the EHR in January, bringing four other local community hospitals onto Epic as well.
“It’s the largest financial investment that this organization has ever made — and it’s not even close,” said South Central Regional President CEO Gregg Gibbes. “Working through the financials or the return and trying to make a business case for it, we were able to do that, I believe. But it was always about the patients. It was always about the staff here, giving them the tools to reach the highest level of success possible, giving them the most access to the most information possible to make the best decisions.”
The push for Epic started about 10 years ago, when Mr. Gibbes started leading a 35-bed county hospital in Mississippi. “I walked through the ER one night, and I heard the ER team talking about how they wished they would have known what medications and allergies this patient had,” he recalled. “That spurred the conversation of we’ve got to find a way to connect the patient’s data versus being siloed on our existing system.”
But the facility wasn’t big enough to afford Epic on its own. As he took on chief executive duties at two other local hospitals, Mr. Gibbes kept trying. The vendor recommended he become a Community Connect partner of a larger organization; he wanted the freedom of contracting directly with Epic. Finally, he became CEO of South Central Regional, which is anchored by a 285-bed public hospital, and had the size to make the deal happen.
South Central Regional brought on 25 new employees for its 80-member implementation team, planning to complete the project in a year. The health system went live on schedule, Jan. 31.
The organization reached 25% MyChart adoption one month in, aiming to hit 35% in the next couple of months and eventually 80%.
“With the rural transformation dollars that are out there, in my opinion, there’s nothing more transformative in our state and, I would think, anywhere than if you put MyChart in the hands of every single patient,” Mr. Gibbes said.
Right off the bat, the organization reached Level 10 of Epic’s Gold Stars benchmarking program for configuration, taking all the EHR vendor had to offer. “Is there another way?” Mr. Gibbes said. “I mean, if you’re going to make the largest financial investment in your organization’s history, you better be all in.”
South Central Regional also set a new record for the number of diagnostic lab connections — nine — through Epic’s new data-exchange network, Aura.
After such a big investment, what will success look like for South Central Regional?
“It would be quantifying the efficiencies, both for our nursing staff and our doctors, being able to point to either minutes saved,” said Alania Pendarvis Cedillo, PharmD, COO of partner hospitals for South Central Regional. “In addition, it would be the retention and securing of new providers. [Physicians] are trained on Epic in residency and feel at home in an Epic program.”
South Central Regional Epic Director Loretta McLaughlin would like the organization to also reach Gold Star Level 10 for its usage of Epic. “We have to make sure we’re proactively reaching out to our nurses and our docs and our back-end staff or our front-end staff, and going, ‘Hey, I noticed we’re not utilizing this one thing we’ve built. Can you tell me why we might not be using that so I can change it and make it better?’ Or show them why it’s better than what they’re currently doing,” she said.
For Chief Administrative Officer Samantha Andrus, it’s improving care access through features like Epic’s Fast Pass, which alerts patients when earlier appointment slots become available, and boosting engagement by getting patients more connected to their medical records. “We had a portal, but the MyChart portal is totally unmatched and has a much easier adoption and functionality, so we’re looking forward to the patients becoming more active in their own care,” she said.
After all the years he spent trying to bring Epic to south-central Mississippi, Mr. Gibbes hopes to extend the EHR to other hospitals across the state.
“It’s our goal to deliver Community Connect to all these small, independent hospitals that otherwise can’t get it,” he said. “Because we’ve been on the other side and we know how that is.”
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