Rockledge, Fla.-based Health First is one of 19 new health systems moving to an Epic EHR. Here are six things to know.
1. The four-hospital system signed a five-year deal with Epic.
2. The implementation is estimated to cost $160 million. That doesn't include ongoing costs to operate the EHR once it's live.
It marks the largest technology investment in the health system's history and one of the organization's biggest spending projects overall (its new hospital, by comparison, has a price tag of $400 million).
3. Epic is expected to be fully operational in January 2026. Health First will use two instances of the EHR: Epic for the patient side and the vendor's Tapestry platform for the health system's payer arm, with hospitals and clinics going live in June 2025 followed by health plan enrollment in October 2025 and claims three months later.
4. The health system currently uses Altera Digital Health (formerly part of Allscripts) and athenahealth for its EHRs.
5. Why did Health First choose Epic? "We needed a modern platform that would give us efficiencies, that would make it easier to access data," Health First CIO Michael Carr told Becker's. "And we want to dramatically improve both the clinician and patient experience. We believe that MyChart and the Epic capabilities are in a class of their own in terms of their ability to really provide that patient-, member-centric experience that we're driving for.
"We believe we can take a lot of the administrative burden off our clinicians, through standardization, through consolidation assistance, and through the additional technology, the capabilities that Epic brings, some of their AI capabilities as well as their integrated platform in terms of getting the data, using data."
Health First also serves many people who live or move from outside its primary market of Brevard County, Fla., so since Epic is the most ubiquitous EHR, this will allow them to more easily share their health information, he said.
Epic also has a "foundation model," where only about 5% of the EHR has to be customized, allowing for a faster implementation (about 18 months from the contract signing), he said.
Mr. Carr said the implementation cost is actually lower than he would have expected — but that the investment will pay off regardless. "Right now, we're at 122 different applications that are going to be turned off. We pay a lot more for that current portfolio of systems than we're going to pay for Epic once we're live," he said. "But really we're reinvesting in our physicians, our nurses … giving them the tools to grow and be effective. Not just from a financial perspective, but from a quality, from an experience, from an efficiency perspective, this is going to yield enormous returns in the future."
6. Of its IT staff of about 350 people, Health First has roughly 85 people dedicated full time to the Epic implementation and has engaged about 1,000 employees including clinicians and revenue cycle staff. Mr. Carr estimates the project will entail at least "a couple hundred thousand hours" of work.