Dive Brief:
- Banner Health has decided to replace a $115 million Epic EHR system installed at two recently acquired hospitals from the University of Arizona with its Cerner platform.
- Banner's Chief Information Officer Ryan Smith said the move would save money and provide better quality of care. "From the cost side of the equation, it makes really good business sense for us to do this migration," he told Healthcare IT News.
- The move fits with the company's efforts to standardize care over the past several years.
Dive Insight:
When Banner acquired the two Arizona hospitals, then operating with the Epic system for about two years, the University of Arizona board of directors reported a $6.8 million loss in April 2014. This loss was attributed to physicians learning how to use the Epic system and delays in implementation.
Besides the importance of standardization by migrating to the Cerner system, Smith added clinical decision support is crucial.
The decision to switch to the Cerner platform involved a lot of debate since the University of Arizona has made a big investment in the Epic implementation. "As we went through and really did the analysis and challenged ourselves around what would it mean to have significant variance in what had historically been a very strong operating model in Banner, we pretty quickly concluded conceptually and philosophically that this migration would make sense," he said.