NEW ORLEANS – Ochsner Health System, with eight hospitals and 40 health centers in Louisiana, is deep into the deployment of a new Epic electronic health record system.

 

The timeline for the project, which launched last fall, coincides with the conversion from an ICD-9 coding system to ICD-10.

 

The plan and the expectation, said Ochsner vice president and CIO Chris Belmont, is a system that will streamline operations, help provide top-notch patient care and eventually – after about six years – shave some expenses from the bottom line.

 

“The most important result of this technology is that our patients will receive the finest possible care and enhance the coordination of care throughout the region,” said Belmont.

 

That’s top of mind also for Richard Milani, MD, a cardiologist who was recruited by Belmont and his team to serve as physician champion for the initiative. He’s a practicing physician who, over the course of 20 years, has developed software for the cardiology department.

 

“This will be great from the patient perspective,” Milani said of the new EHR system. “They will receive better preventive care and chronic disease care, will have anytime access to their medical record, have easier access to their doctor, and have their medical records more readily available to other physicians and hospitals that need them.”

 

Ochsner has 800 employed physicians and another 800 to 1,000 physicians who are affiliated with one or another of the hospitals in the Oschner system. The health system grew quickly after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when Tenet Healthcare left the New Orleans market and Ochsner acquired five Tenet hospitals and two others.

 

Ochsner will be replacing its self-developed ambulatory EMR and its Siemens Envision inpatient EMR with the Epic system.

 

The Ochsner growth necessitated a different model of an EMR that integrated the health record on a single platform, said Chad Jones, Ochsner’s Epic project executive and assistant vice president of corporate systems. “Our patients move from region to region – both on the ambulatory side and on the inpatient side, and they go across town to see a different type of specialist or from Baton Rouge to New Orleans,” he said.

“And we really need a much more integrated view to deliver better patient care.”

 

On the inpatient side, the data is siloed today, said Jones.

 

“We were looking for that truly integrated inpatient and outpatient electronic medical record,” he said. “So from that perspective, it limits the market. We didn’t want interfaces.”

 

Jones said the Ochsner team was looking for a strong, integrated ambulatory offering, “Our clinics are really the heart and soul of who Ochsner Health System is,” he said. Ochsner has hired 60 new full-time employees to implement the Epic system.