Customization of Epic Community Connect Brings Value to Physician Practices

The following is a guest blog post by Matt Leipsner and Eric James from Atos and Julie Smith AVP IT Technology, Epic & Clinical Quality at AdvantageCare Physicians.

AdvantageCare Physicians (ACP) is one of the largest medical groups in the New York metro area, serving half a million patients with 36 offices across the boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, as well as Long Island.  Their team is committed to providing physician practices with the technology they need to best serve patients.  They implemented Epic and Epic Community Connect quickly became an important part of their strategy to offer robust functionality at an affordable price to their physician practices.

Epic Community Connect allows ACP to extend their EHR community to the physician practices. The community practices can use the fully functional EHR while maintaining independent financial and scheduling information. This works well for most of their physician practices, but ACP had a desire to provide additional customization of the Epic Community Connect experience for some practices based on business or branding needs.

ACP recently acquired a multi-specialty medical practice in the Bronx, New York that provides care to individuals and families within the Bronx. They pride themselves in their high-touch approach to care that is patient centered, compassionate and quality driven. ACP sought to create a completely independent instance of Epic MyChart for the practice while adhering to the stringent requirements of the vendor. This was an ambitious goal with an aggressive timeline.

ACP partnered with Atos to customize this experience.  The customization included building the completely independent instance of Epic MyChart in less than 3 weeks.  The teams also delivered a separate mobile experience on the same timeline.  The custom portal was well received by the practices and provided the experience they were seeking for clinicians and patients.

The value created through this collaboration:

  1. Flexibility in Configuration: Creating a separate instance allows for independent settings to be established within the Community Connect environment.
  2. Easier to Maintain: Application functionality can be modified and changed within both environments, without having any impact on other clients.
  3. Customization at Client Level: Specific features can be turned off/on so that there is no dependency on the other client for required needs
  4. Client Branded: The client branding established at entry point to Epic and throughout the application.
  5. Segregation of Patient Data. Access to patient data limited can be limited to the users of their specific environment.

As healthcare organizations continue down the challenging road of EHR adoption, the ability to customize the experience for clinicians and patients provides tremendous value.  The ACP and Atos’ teams implemented Epic Community Connect, created a completely independent portal, and delivered the separate mobile experience.  After the positive feedback from the practice, they are working to embed a link in the Epic patient chart that links directly to a legacy archive solution.  These modifications save time for physicians- a critical outcome in today’s healthcare environment.

With physician burnout at an all time high, these unique customizations should be considered more often.  We must continue to give time back to clinicians so they can focus on patient care.

About the Contributors:
Matt Leipsner is a Client Executive for Healthcare Services at Atos.
Eric James is the Epic Cache Systems Manager at Atos.
Julie Smith is the AVP IT Technology, Epic & Clinical Quality at AdvantageCare Physicians.
Heather Haugen PhD is the Chief Science Officer for Digital Healthcare Solutions at Atos.
Inbal Vuletich serves as the editor for Atos Digital Health Solution publications.

About AdvantageCare Physicians:
AdvantageCare Physicians (ACP), the largest primary and specialty care practice in the New York area, to provide quality, personalized care that is focused on the whole patient. With medical offices across the five boroughs and Long Island, ACP takes a team-based approach to care where physicians work with nurses, social workers, nutritionists, behavioral health specialists and other professionals. www.ACPNY.com.

About Atos Digital Health Solutions
Atos Digital Health Solutions helps healthcare organizations clarify business objectives while pursuing safer, more effective healthcare that manages costs and engagement across the care continuum. Our leadership team, consultants, and certified project and program managers bring years of practical and operational hospital experience to each engagement. Together, we’ll work closely with you to deliver meaningful outcomes that support your organization’s goals. Our team works shoulder-to-shoulder with your staff, sharing what we know openly. The knowledge transfer throughout the process improves skills and expertise among your team as well as ours. We support a full spectrum of products and services across the healthcare enterprise including Population Health, Value-Based Care, Security and Enterprise Business Strategy Advisory Services, Revenue Cycle Expertise, Adoption and Simulation Programs, ERP and Workforce Management, Go-Live Solutions, EHR Application Expertise, as well as Legacy and Technical Expertise. Atos is a proud sponsor of Healthcare Scene.

   

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