Cleveland Clinic Brings Epic Smarts To NY Hospital Practices

The Cleveland Clinic is going the consulting route, this time around by working with the physician and specialty practices for a New York hospital to bring Epic up to speed.

Glens Falls is a 410-bed nonprofit which began implementing the Epic EMR in early 2012. The New York facility has 3,000 employees and 28 regional locations.

Apparently dissatisfied with its internal knowledge base on the subject, It’s now contracted with the Clinic’s MyPractice Healthcare Solutions (MPHS) to help deploy and optimize its rollout, reports the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Among the Epic products installed at Glens Falls is “MyChart,” offering a clinical and billing records portal for patients, according to the Plain Dealer.

The Cleveland Clinic has had Epic in place for more than 10 years, making it one of the first healthcare systems in the country to install the vendor’s product. Having learned from that experience, Cleveland Clinic MPHS now brings project management and implementation expertise to other facilities.

I think this is an interesting business model for the Cleveland Clinic, and I’d be curious to see what other consulting agreements it has put into place. (So far I wasn’t able to turn up any others but my guess is that they exist.)

It seems to me that hospitals who have tamed Epic — Kaiser Permanente comes to mind — might very well go into this line of business, as the need is great. Not to mention that if I were making a decision as to who I’d hire to wire my medical practice into my hospital, a successful institution would have a very strong pitch to make.

Can any of you readers share other examples of hospitals/clinics who are turning their Epic experience into a consulting revenue stream?

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

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