Phelps Health to implement Epic for unified EHR system

Phelps Health has selected Epic to provide a platform to tie all of Phelps’ care areas to a single unified electronic health record.

The provider serves 200,000 residents in south central Missouri, with 1,800 employees, a 242-bed hospital and more than 100 providers. “The Epic system represents a major investment in our healthcare system and will tie in all of our departments, clinics and offices,” says Ed Clayton, president and CEO at Phelps Health.

The organization believes Epic will make it easier for providers to communicate and access needed patient information, and enable quicker turnaround times that will mean less time spent looking for documents and more time with patients.

“While this is a large undertaking for our organization, partnering with Epic allows for a tremendous opportunity to streamline care across our health system,” adds Jason Shenefield, senior vice president and chief operating officer. “Having access to consolidated patient records across different clinical areas further will support care when patients are referred to specialists or other ancillary services at Phelps Health.”

Implementation of Epic is underway with an expected go-live date in late 2020.


Other contract wins and go-lives during the past week include the following:

• Deployment of the Military Health Systems’ electronic health record, known as MHS GENESIS, continues with work being done using best-in class off-the-shelf products at Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho; Travis Air Force Base, Calif.; Naval Health Clinic Lemoore, Calif.; the Presidio of Monterey, and the U.S. Army Health Clinic in California. Initial deployment of MHS GENESIS was completed at four sites in the Pacific Northwest in January 2018, and each month these sites continue to document more than 100,000 patient encounters, increased referralls processed, more patients seen, prescriptions filled and secure messaging being used, officials say.

• Nashville, Tenn.-based Ardent Health Services currently contracts with Ciox, which provides release of information services at several facilities within Ardent. Under a new agreement, Ciox services will expand to additional Ardent facilities. Ardent Health Services and its subsidiaries own and operate 30 hospitals in six states with 25,000 employees and 1,150 employed providers. The phased implementation of the program will cover all Ardent hospitals and clinics by the end of 2019.

• Owensboro Health in Kentucky is an early adopter of a portfolio of pediatric-specialized software to enable pediatricians to access real-time clinical intelligence to improve care and use metrics to assess and document care quality. The software enables physicians to dictate pediatric notes directly into the electronic health record and decision support offers in-workflow advice to improve documentation accuracy while also giving pediatric documentation guidance to meet regulatory and billing requirements. “Nuance helps the team identify patient encounters with the greatest opportunity for clinical documentation improvement, increasing our productivity and delivering desired outcomes to achieve our goals,” says Sharon Cooper, manager of clinical documentation and appeals at Owensboro Health.

• MaineGeneral Medical Center in Augusta, Maine, has selected the population health management platform of HealthEC. The provider serves patients from 88 cities throughout the Kennebec Valley Region and will use the platform to support data aggregation, analytics and care coordination. “Health EC’s platform will give us a much more holistic view of our patient population, and we look forward to leveraging its capabilities to improve patient care, optimize performance and succeed with value-based care across the organization,” says Chuck Hays, president and CEO.