Epic Systems is a leading electronic medical records software company with records for more than 280 million patients worldwide. AdventHealth is one of the largest nonprofit healthcare organizations in the United States, serving more than five million patients annually across nine states.
The Need
As a large healthcare system, AdventHealth manages tens of thousands of electronic medical records (EMR) workstations company-wide. Managing that amount of hardware at that scale is a manual and time-consuming endeavor. AdventHealth needed a solution to significantly reduce the time and effort required to configure and deploy EMR workstations.
Challenges
Front-line IT staff must routinely add/replace workstations as part of their day-to-day responsibilities, and the built-in solution from Epic Systems (AdventHealth's EMR system of record) requires staff to manually run commands from a Linux workstation via SSH access to Putty (Epic's Secure Shell tool).
For a large healthcare organization with more than 51 hospital campuses and 83,000 employees, this method required cumbersome security and access control procedures, resulting in an administrative bottleneck that resulted in workstations sometimes being unavailable for days before the associated IT ticket could be addressed.
Epic Systems often recommends building a custom web application that allows IT tech staff to perform these actions securely and efficiently, without needing individual SSH access to a Linux workstation and without needing to execute operations on a command line.
Our Role
Working with team members from both Epic and AdventHealth, we created a web application that streamlined a number of routine IT business processes, allowing front-line IT staff to more efficiently and securely manage Epic EMR workstations organization-wide. Tasks that would normally require escalations to different teams can now be handled directly, resulting in significantly reduced IT ticket backlogs and EMR workstation downtimes.
The custom web application enabled:
- search for specific Epic EMR workstations
- create, edit, delete, swap, and duplicate workstations
- configure workstations based on standard templates
- perform bulk operations to manage multiple workstations simultaneously
- validate legacy records
- automatically create an audit log
- generate reports
- Active Directory (AD) integration for login
- role-based permissions
This solution reduced multi-stakeholder processes that would take a full week to complete down to a mere few minutes by a single IT staff member, and saves AdventHealth estimated thousands of IT staff hours per year.
