Health & Wellness
Continuing to build on a foundation for growth and expansion, Memorial Health recently completed a system-wide implementation of Epic, a best-in-class electronic medical records (EMR) platform. Ultimately, Epic will unify Memorial’s array of systems across the hospital and physician practices, and become the health system’s sole electronic health record platform.
“The health care of today has become significantly more complex and data intensive,” shares Chip Hubbs, CEO/President of Memorial Health. “As Memorial expands our services to the growing region, having different record technologies meant our team members needed to be proficient in multiple systems – and our expanding patient population could be accessing separate portals. An element of our growth strategy over the years has been to monitor this. And we recognized how this could create inefficiencies and barriers to the collaboration so essential to the Memorial Health patient experience. In order to better serve our patients and provide our team members with the tools to perform more effectively, we worked to implement this single, integrated health record management system.”
The organization went “live” with the EMR implementation on September 29, 2020. The new system also features Epic’s patient portal named MyChart, giving patients digital access to their medical records. MyChart allows patients to view medical test results, request prescription refills, send messages to the care team, and access appointment information.
In addition, patients can utilize MyChart to consolidate care for children and other family members, including accessing appointments, test results, and prescriptions.
On the clinical side, the new system includes decision-support tools that equip providers with alerts to prevent medication errors, avoid duplicative and unnecessary tests, and keep patients preventive health screenings on schedule.
“For many reasons, this year has certainly been one for the history books,” added Hubbs. “With Memorial’s transition to the Epic and MyChart platform, we are elated to announce this historic move benefitting our patients and their families, in addition to our team members across our various area locations. I am proud of our 1,000 plus employees who have continued to focus their efforts on providing best-in-class patient care to those we serve.”
