In November 2017, Columbia, Weill Cornell Medicine, and NewYork-Presbyterian signed a contract with Epic to create a single integrated electronic health record (EHR) across the three institutions, with the goal of making it easier for physicians and clinical staff across the organizations to deliver outstanding patient care.
As part of this monumental endeavor, a crucial first step was to move Epic to vendor cloud hosting. Over the past few months ITS has lead the planning and execution of the Epic migration to the vendor’s Wisconsin data center, which is scheduled for later this summer.
In addition, ITS was tasked with implementing new operations and data sharing programs to support the Epic Enterprise collaboration with NYP and Columbia. On that front, we’re happy to report that integration of the new EpicTogether teams is ahead of schedule with most policy changes also on track. A specific governance structure has been put in place to oversee the EpicTogether collaboration. This includes a tripartite governance structure to ensure that each institution has an equal say in guiding EpicTogether, as well as a complex implementation team. On May 15, the EpicTogether team and 50 members of the project team from Epic headquarters gathered at Columbia for a kickoff meeting. During the meeting, EpicTogether team members received a detailed overview of the integration implementation by the Epic project team.
This month, representatives from Epic headquarters have led a series of Direction Sessions, during which they demonstrate the recommended EpicTogether workflows, content, and tools to Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) from WCM, Columbia and NYP. During these sessions, the SMEs take a first look at the Epic system and suggest modifications in preparation for the build, which begins July 30.