OU Health standardizes on Epic, reduces interface development time

As a healthcare leader, you’re facing growing demands and having to tap into shrinking resources to accomplish your goals.
 
Perhaps your organization has decided to standardize on a single electronic health record (EHR) like Epic. As you continue to grow, you bring new systems into your IT landscape. This means your team needs to build and rebuild data exchange interfaces.
 
Through M&A activity, OU Health has achieved operational excellence, optimized their limited time, people, and financial resources, and safeguarded their data all while setting their IT landscape up for success now and in the future.

OU Health is Oklahoma’s only integrated, comprehensive academic health system and home to the state’s only Level I Trauma Center. Headquartered near downtown Oklahoma City, OU Health provides healthcare, conducts medical research, and educates the physicians of tomorrow. Members of OU Health Physicians, the state’s largest physician group, provide care at the hospital facilities and at OU Health Physicians clinics in Oklahoma City and across the state.

The OU Health integration team consists of six full-time, in-house engineers and business analysts as well as 10 contractors who are supporting an EHR migration. Together, the team oversees business functions related to legacy systems, which will eventually be phased out, and the build-out of their future state environment.

In 2018, what was then OU Medical Center, left a joint operating agreement with another organization to form a locally owned nonprofit organization, known then as OU Medicine. In 2021, OU Medicine and OU Physicians began integrating to become OU Health. The hospital and physician practices were operating on two different electronic health record (EHR) systems and needed to standardize on a single platform: Epic. In addition, operations and IT leadership realized that their legacy integration engine would not meet the needs of the growing health system, so they began evaluating new solutions.

Leadership at OU Health selected Corepoint to serve as a single integration engine to connect all applications across the enterprise, including the lab information system (LIS), cancer center, and children’s hospital, as well as more than 100 third-party vendor systems and the Oklahoma Department of Health. OU Health chose Corepoint for its ease of use and flexibility, which allow IT leaders to rely on a wider pool of talent to build, monitor, and maintain integrations.

“Being able to bring in analysts and developers who didn’t have to know a specific programming language and didn’t need to be highly experienced within an engine was a big requirement Corepoint offered that most of the other vendors did not,” said Russell Cleary, director of integration for OU Health.

Another benefit? Support — especially during the early stages of deployment. “Corepoint support is renowned as being top of KLAS® as far as being able to call, get a knowledgeable person on the line, and learning best practices. We did not experience that level of support with previous vendors used or other competitors we evaluated.”

OU Health is now sending approximately 1.1 million messages through Corepoint daily. With Corepoint, the integration team has reported many improvements in the creation, monitoring, and maintenance of data integrations in terms of efficiency, speed, and ease-of-use.

“With our previous engine, we would average anywhere between 16 and 20 hours to build an interface,” Cleary said. “We’ve cut that down to about eight hours per interface. We’ve seen a significant rise in efficiency in developing at a faster pace than we previously were.”

Because Corepoint is easier to use and all integrations are managed in one system, Cleary and his team are less reliant on outside contractors for integration management. Not only does this cut down on administrative resources associated with creating individual statements of work, but it also allows them to troubleshoot issues faster and more proactively support clinician workflows.

“Logging into multiple systems was a big dissatisfier for our clinicians,” Cleary said. “Having data in one location instead of multiple systems with different logins and access consolidates clinician workflows and results in a better clinician and patient experience.”

The monitoring feature within Corepoint has also boosted the team’s efficiency. “The alerts we’ve built within the monitor have freed up the time it takes to troubleshoot issues. The fact that we can view the alert, click on an interface, and immediately see and search the message log makes troubleshooting so much more efficient than what we were previously dealing with.”

Cleary and his team also find the custom annotation feature in Corepoint to be helpful. This feature allows his team to add annotations to individual integrations so that other users who are less experienced with Corepoint can quickly and easily understand how the integrations work.

For instance, if an OU Health employee believes an integration with a third-party system is down, they can call the main IT help desk and get the assistance they need. The help desk representative can click on that interface within the Corepoint monitor, view the annotation, and find details about the vendor, how the data workflow is supposed to function, and what other systems may be impacted

What’s next? Cleary and his team have recently begun building FHIR-based and other API test integrations to Epic and look forward to deploying those soon.