MinuteClinic Goes With Epic – What’s It Mean?

Retail clinic operator MinuteClinic has decided to purchase and roll out the Epic EMR, upgrading from its home built system it’s used until now.  MinuteClinic, a division of CVS Caremark, expects the rollout to take about 18 months.

This is a big win for Epic.  An estimated 274,000 physicians will use the company’s EMR, and roughly 51% the US population will have a record in Epic when its current customer rollouts are complete.

And MinuteClinic has big expansion plans, which will bring Epic to a wide range of new environments.  According to Andrew Sussman, MD, president of Minute Clinic and senior vice president/associate chief medical officer, CVS Caremark,  the company is expanding rapidly, having added more than 350 clinics in the past three years, and planning to reach 1,500 clinics by 2017.

“EpicCare will take us to the next level by offering enhanced connectivity with other providers, more advanced patient portal capabilities and key analytics to run our practice more efficiently and improve patient care,” Sussman said in a press statement.

What’s particularly interesting about this deal is not just that Epic has racked up another big customer, though keeping an eye on their progress is definitely important. No, what’s more newsworthy is the possibility that epic is slowly but steadily changing its strategy, from selling only to large hospitals to exploring other customer relationships on the ambulatory side.

Not only is Epic rolling out a large ambulatory deal with MinuteClinic, the EMR vendor has struck a deal with the Cleveland Clinic and Dell under which the Clinic and Dell offer providers EMR consulting installation configuration and hosting service for Epic.  Bearing in mind the needs of ambulatory providers, the Cleveland Clinic deal even allows buyers to have the Epic EMR hosted mostly by Dell.

Certainly Epic won’t stop pursuing big hospital deals, but the MinuteClinic and Cleveland Clinic agreements suggest that Epic may be looking for other markets beyond the large hospital market. It looks like ambulatory is on their radar and we know they’ve been working hard to grow internationally.

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.

1 Comment

  • Epic – the most widely used EMR in the U.S. – will support MinuteClinic’s evidence based model of care and facilitate connectivity with health care providers nationwide that currently use Epic, including many major health systems, hospital networks and physician groups currently affiliated with MinuteClinic.

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