AltaMed Health Services, based in Los Angeles, recently completed migration to Epic Hyperdrive, which has improved its response time, Raymond Lowe, senior vice president and CIO of the health system, told Becker's.
Epic Systems is moving the current primary end user application, Hyperspace, to a web-based framework, Hyperdrive. The vendor made the announcement at its User Group Meeting in 2021.
Hyperdrive, according to Mr. Lowe, is Epic's new client application that is a secure, Epic-specific web browser for clients that host Hyperspace activities. As AltaMed is hosted by Epic, the health system worked closely with its Epic partners to determine how and where its implementation upgrades would occur.
As part of the move, AltaMed's Epic analyst teams performed rigorous testing to validate the system's performance, as designed, prior to releasing the upgrade. In addition to its Epic Analysts, AltaMed's clinical informatics team tested clinical workflows to validate that the system worked correctly.
AltaMed then used a three-phase approach in transitioning to Hyperdrive, starting with piloting it with its clinical informatics team and selecting super-users. The health system moved to pre-testing at eight sites before rolling it out to all its remaining sites.
During the go-live of the new upgrade to Hyperdrive, AltaMed's Epic partners remained on-site to resolve any issues that may have transpired.
"This has been a solid technical upgrade for AltaMed," Mr. Lowe said. "With the Epic Hyperdrive transition, once logged in, response time improvements have greatly improved."
According to Mr. Lowe, just a few days into the go-live, front desk staff and providers were already providing feedback about how much faster Hyperdrive was. Mr. Lowe also said the new features, such as expanded search functions, made its users' jobs more streamlined and functional, allowing its providers to have more time for patients, and its nursing staff to be more effective.