Maximizing ROI with Epic Consulting: From Implementation to Optimization and Upgrades

Why Healthcare Organizations Hire Epic Consultants

Epic consultants are professionals with deep expertise in managing this top-ranked EHR application. Strategically augmenting internal IT teams with consultants provides numerous advantages to healthcare organizations, including:

• The ability to seamlessly fill in staffing gaps
• Broad and niche application knowledge throughout the entire process
• An emphasis on process efficiency while remaining in compliance
• Faster return on investment (ROI)

A behind-the-scenes look at the implementation process can serve as an example.

Understanding the Epic Implementation Process

The process begins with establishing goals, tasks, timelines, and deadlines for the Epic implementation that fit within the project scope and budget. As part of the project planning process, experts must analyze the current infrastructure, systems, and workflows. Our Epic consulting professionals can help determine project readiness and create a comprehensive implementation plan.

Working in collaboration with internal IT teams, Epic consulting professionals gather input from relevant stakeholders. They focus on gaining a fuller understanding of a healthcare organization’s project goals, conducting workflow analyses, and examining organizational procedures.

Armed with gathered knowledge, internal teams and external resource professionals implement the Epic EHR application in ways that integrate seamlessly with a healthcare organization’s processes. This involves cleaning, appropriately archiving, and migrating data from the previous EHR system to the Epic one. Experienced consultants perform this crucial task with care and precision to ensure data integrity.

The application is then tested first in a sandbox environment that mirrors real-world workflows to ensure that the implementation works well and that all items have been completed before the software goes live.

Concurrently, Epic consultants with expertise in training end-users design engaging and interactive educational programs and craft technical user manuals. Using stakeholder inputs, these consultants modify training elements in response to end-user feedback to ensure a clear understanding of the system.

EHR consultants also guide healthcare organizations through the transition to going live with their Epic application, with post-go-live support available to optimize the experience.

Addressing Challenges With Epic Implementations

Consultants can support your internal team from start to finish, proactively anticipating potential challenges and creating workarounds. Here are three of the most common.

Augmenting Staffing and Training Gaps

Throughout the implementation, you’ll want to confidently know that expertise exists for each step of the process. Epic consulting professionals at HealthTECH Resources cover the entire range of staffing specialties to ensure that the process doesn’t stop because of a knowledge or skills gap, which would slow ROI. Similarly, Epic consultants train end-users at your healthcare organization in ways that address specific needs. That way, you’ll achieve ROI more fully and efficiently.

Inefficient End-User Adoption

Reasons for this challenge include:

• Insufficient buy-in before beginning the training
• Training that doesn’t mesh well with end-user requirements
• Lack of engagement and interactivity between the trainer and trainees

For each of these problems and any others that occur, end-user reluctance to use the Epic system adds unnecessary roadblocks. The more open and willing the staff are to change, the smoother the adoption and usage will be. Change management experts in our network build user engagement for increased adoption, long-term satisfaction, and faster ROI. Our consultants excel in motivating teams, overcoming resistance, and driving momentum forward.

Integration Complexities With Epic

The robust Epic application provides organizations with powerful tools to manage patient healthcare records. That same robustness, however, can complicate integrations with existing technologies. No matter how complex the landscape is, our Epic consulting company can supply experts to resolve integration challenges.

Achieving Success During Epic Go-Live

When the Go-Live date approaches, Epic consultants work side by side with your in-house team to ensure pre-launch validations and configurations, verifying all technical aspects of the upcoming event. From the human resource side, experts will ensure completion of change management and staff training initiatives. In combination, this dual technical-HR emphasis minimizes downtime and reduces adoption risks.

Applications may go live across an organization on the same day. Or, they may be strategically rolled out by facility location, department, or other avenue. Expert Epic consulting professionals help organizations determine the optimal Epic go-live strategy.

Optimizing Your Epic System for Maximum Impact

To maximize ROI, consultants identify workflow and reporting gaps, developing solutions to close up gaps. Customizations in solutions optimize clinical, financial, and operational efficiencies with an ongoing improvement approach. Each unique process receives attention to boost efficiency and productivity, enhance data accuracy, boost end-user adoption rates, and increase security.

Epic optimization reduces the administrative burden of using the application. This can be especially useful in this era of fatigued end-users, including burned-out physicians, with fewer clicks and less navigation, helping to reduce frustration. This can improve patient outcomes and satisfaction.

Epic Upgrades: Planning and Execution

Upgrading your Epic EHR provides numerous benefits, including improved functionality with new features, enhanced cybersecurity, consistent regulatory compliance, and addressed software bugs. With a robust, up-to-date system, healthcare organizations can provide better patient care through more efficient data management and analysis and improved interoperability.

No two application upgrades are ever alike, and each contains unique challenges and opportunities. For a seamless upgrade, consider consultant-led planning by Epic specialists who remain at the cutting-edge of knowledge about this application.

Although less complex than the initial transition to Epic, installing an upgrade should follow the same general plan as an implementation. This includes careful planning to ensure minimal disruption, a successful upgrade, and organizational satisfaction.

When Epic announces an upgrade, it’s essential to determine what specifics are involved: which are essential for operations and which are optional. An expert Epic consultant can analyze these details to identify how the upgrade will save time, reduce costs, and improve patient care.

Some upgrades impact hardware while others affect software and/or interfaces. Early in the process, Epic experts must determine whether a healthcare organization’s technical infrastructure remains sufficient. This includes ensuring server and processor capacity meet the demands of the upgraded application. Specialists from our Epic consultant company’s network will review the documentation provided with the information about the upgrade, verifying requirements are met or recommending enhancements as needed.

Another situation to analyze: whether third-party software used by the healthcare organization will effectively mesh with an upgraded Epic system. This also involves a review of technology peripherals. Performing this assessment proactively prevents integration issues, for which Epic assumes no responsibility.

After reviewing updated test scripts, conscientious Epic consulting professionals (like those in the HealthTECH Resources network) also examine workflows, both large and small, for maximum integration post-upgrade.

Our Epic consultants also focus on the human element during upgrades, embedding change management strategies from the start. Trainers develop engaging programs that allow end-users to navigate changes triggered by the upgrade in a real-world environment before those changes become part of the live application. This ensures end-users can use the upgraded Epic software confidently and efficiently, with minimal workflow disruption.

Throughout the process, cybersecurity specialists ensure safe upgrading processes. This often uncovers existing security gaps, allowing them to be addressed and protecting patients and the organization.

Choosing the Right Epic Consulting Partner

Selecting the right Epic consulting partner allows healthcare organizations to streamline their EHR technology to boost efficiency, improve productivity, free up more time for quality patient care, and more rapidly achieve ROI.

Reasons why so many healthcare organizations choose HealthTECH Resources include our:

• Over 25 years as a boutique-style agency that solely focuses on healthcare IT
• Deep knowledge and insights into top EHR applications, including Epic
• Range of Epic implementation experts to supplement staffing gaps across the spectrum
• Rapid, accurate consultant fulfillment, often within 48 hours, even when stringent requirements exist

HealthTECH Resources supports organizations throughout implementations, providing training, go-live, and post-go-live support, along with upgrade and optimization consulting services. Our company offers short-term and long-term consultant placements that serve as independent contractors. Long-term consultants can work with the same healthcare organization for a time frame of several months to a couple of years, depending upon the complexity of requirements.

We also offer permanent placements in which the Epic consultants become your organization’s employees. In this scenario, our highly skilled leadership would source the appropriate candidates for your Epic EHR needs and place them with your healthcare organization.

Partner with Epic Consulting Experts Today

When your healthcare organization partners with expert Epic consultants, you benefit from efficient implementations, updates, and system optimizations, helping your facilities achieve the desired ROI more quickly. To find out how HealthTECH Resources can help you reach your goals within your budget and timeline, please reach out online to schedule a call with one of our experts. Or, call us at (866) 826-1270.