EHR Updates

Innovation for the ultimate patient experience!

Our Strategy

Our primary Electronic Health Record (EHR) vendor, Epic, releases four new versions of their platform every year. At Loma Linda, we update our entire system twice a year. That means each update will typically include two versions and all of their related enhancements. This strategy allows us to continue delivering new functionality and keeping up with best-practice recommendations and regulatory requirements, while avoiding the disruption of quarterly downtimes and go lives. Epic integrates with many third-party ancillary systems, so when we upgrade our EHR, the project team also evaluates and implements new features in all the downstream systems, too. This strategy allows us to uphold cross-system compatibility and ensure the entire EHR platform is continually improving – not just the Epic system. Additionally, the work involved in these projects goes above and beyond maintaining current performance – we implement dozens of new features and add new enhancements that provide key new business functionality.

Our official naming convention used in our project documents contains the year and season to make it clear what implementation it is related to:

• “EHR 2020 – Fall Implementation”.

You may have heard these projects referred to as “Epic Upgrades” or “EHR Implementations” in the past.

Contact Info:

• Email the EHR Update leaders at EHRUpdate@llu.edu

Why Multiple Releases?

General Timeline

Project Phases

Design and Build

The Gold Stars Program

Epic has a program called Gold Stars designed to help organizations identify features that we can use to improve clinical and financial outcomes. It currently contains 700+ items they highly recommend all organizations implement based on the experience of our industry peers and Epic staff. The items are organized by focuses to help direct our optimization efforts, and assigned tiers based on the feature’s complexity and impact. Incomplete Gold Star items are reviewed with stakeholders during the design process each upgrade to determine if any can be included in scope along with the required changes and new version enhancements.

Testing

For info specific to our current ongoing implementation, please see the OnePortal page for Our Current Update.