epic consultants

Supporting Growing Hospital Systems Through
Mission Driven EPIC Support for Over 25 Years

Upgrading Your Epic Application to Maximize Usage and ROI

To continue providing the best possible care at your healthcare facility, performing an upgrade of your Epic system to the latest version and optimizing its usage is a vital step in the ongoing maintenance.

Major EHR upgrades are intricate, time-intensive procedures, so you’ll want an experienced team of Epic consultants at your side. From planning your Epic upgrade to going live with the latest version, our experienced EHR professionals will work right alongside your IT team for a successful upgrade.

CIO or IT Director Needing Consulting Support?

Our specialized consultants can help you implement, optimize, and manage your healthcare IT systems efficiently.

Trusted by leading healthcare organizations across the country — Get a response within 24 hours.

MISSION SPOTLIGHT

Our mission is to drive excellence in healthcare through tailored IT consulting solutions.

Our Epic Upgrade Services Include:

  • Implementation and optimization
  • Cross-platform integration
  • System testing
  • EHR training
  • Go-live/post-live support
  • Data collection/reporting/analysis

Experienced professionals in the HealthTECH network offer many of the same services for an EMR upgrade as they do when first implementing new systems. This is true when Epic upgrades include new modules, functionalities, and interfaces as well as when upgrades contain fixes.

Our team seamlessly handles upgrades of Epic’s technical infrastructure, which involves collaboration with Epic Systems: explicitly following the technical documentation provided by the company and conducting in-depth testing to ensure completion of the technical upgrade.

Plus, some upgrades focus on enhancing the end-user experience, and our experts can identify how it would change for them and tailor workflows for continued success with the application. Many times, these end-user upgrades contain improved functionalities that, with training and practice, can make your teams’ use of the system much more efficient.

Implementation and Optimization of Upgrades

Our experts can dissect each part of an upgrade and share with you what’s mandatory and what’s optional—along with how each of these elements will improve functionalities and affect workflows. They can also make recommendations about optional upgrades and ensure that decisions are effectively made about each.

Cross-Platform Integration

Changes that occur during the EHR upgrade can have an impact on how the system integrates with other technologies used by your healthcare organization. Our experts can identify those, create solutions, and test them to ensure that all seamlessly works well together again. Our goal: integrations that are so seamless that end users aren’t even aware of them.

System Testing

While the upgrade is still in a testing environment, our professionals will conduct strategic experiments to ensure that the implementation and integration processes went smoothly with desired results. Skipping this step or doing so in a more surface manner can lead to expensive mistakes that can require redoing work: adding time, money, and frustration to the experience. Our specialists will minimize the risk to maximize success. Training and Process Documentation With upgrades, end users—who are now accustomed to using Epic—will need to understand changes in workflow and, perhaps, the new tools that are provided in the EHR upgrade package. Training sessions can be provided for end-users or professionals from our network can provide process documentation and demonstrate usage changes to your in-house IT team.

Go-Live/Post-Live Support

As the red letter day approaches, our Epic upgrade experts will help to ensure that all items in the punch list are completed, including training sessions, and that the upgraded system is ready for use. Afterward, they can provide support with the newly-lived upgraded application, answering questions from your end users and ensuring that all is working as planned. They can also serve as support for your in-house IT team.

Data Collection/Reporting/Analysis

Specialists from the HealthTECH Resources network can customize data collection, including demonstrating new functionalities of the upgraded system. This information can be provided in easy-to-read reports with an analysis of the results included. Your healthcare organization will have its own unique needs, and our professionals can provide just what you require.

Contact HealthTECH for Your EMR Upgrades

Our boutique-style agency has been augmenting IT staff for healthcare organizations for more than twenty years. We’re the fastest, most knowledgeable staff supplementation firm available today with a sole focus on the EMR/EHR/healthcare IT space.

We maintain deep industry connections and we have cultivated a deep and wide network of EHR professionals with unique niches and skill sets. Our agency can help your healthcare organization analyze its in-house staff, including their specialties and bandwidths. We’ll then listen to your goals and challenges, filling in staffing gaps with the types of professionals you need for a successful EHR upgrade.

Please contact us online or call (602) 903-7961 today! We look forward to helping you.

CIO or IT Director Needing Consulting Support?

Our specialized consultants can help you implement, optimize, and manage your healthcare IT systems efficiently.

Trusted by leading healthcare organizations across the country — Get a response within 24 hours.

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Epic Upgrade FAQs

An Epic upgrade is when a healthcare organization that’s currently using an older version of the application and is in need to update its software to the most current version. Upgrades can consist of actual application changes as well as technical infrastructure updates and usage alterations for end users. This is different from when new modules such as Garden Plot are added to your organization’s technology to take advantage of additional functionalities.

This brand of EHR software is highly responsive to user needs. For example, Epic Systems was inspired to create Epic Cheers during the early days of the pandemic to help healthcare facilities keep patients engaged even when not inside the four walls of a medical building. Upgrades go beyond adding new modules, though, allowing you to benefit from the latest version of Epic.

Some upgrades are especially focused on making the EHR application even easier to use while others ensure that you’re being kept up to date from a regulatory and compliance angle. Still, others can enhance interoperability so that you can provide even better levels of patient care as you have relevant information at your fingertips. No matter what a specific Epic upgrade will help accomplish, it will allow your healthcare facility maximize usage and boost return on investment.

In August 2018, Epic changed itd EMR upgrade schedule. They used to provide large upgrades containing numerous advances to their EHR system. They changed this schedule, though, now providing upgrades more often—meaning quarterly—so that facilities benefitting from the upgrade can receive the releases more quickly. It would seldom be practical to implement every upgrade as soon as it happens because implementations take planning. Healthcare facilities, therefore, tend to upgrade every year or every 18 months or two years. The specifics of what’s contained in an upgrade may cause them to move more quickly if it’s of special interest to their organization.

Here at HealthTECH Resources, our EMR consultants can help in many ways. First, we can keep your healthcare organization up to date about what’s in a particular EMR upgrade. We can help you to plan its implementation, personalizing workflows for your specific procedures; assist you in choosing which optional elements should be incorporated into your application; train your end users on the changes that will occur; test for interoperability; customize reports; and much more. To get started with your EHR upgrade, please contact us online or call (602) 903-7961.