(Spirit Lake)– Lakes Regional Healthcare is transitioning to a new electronic health record system. LRH President and CEO Jason Harrington says they’ll go live with the Epic system May 30th…
“For anybody that travels to Mayo Clinic as part of their tertiary care, Mayo uses Epic, and in fact, Epic as a company, has about 42 percent of the market and covers about 54 percent of hospital beds. It’s certainly a very well known platform and we’re excited for that. We’ve been working on this process with the Avera system for about the last 18 months.”
Harrington says the new system will offer greater efficiencies for Lakes Regional Healthcare, physicians, and patients…
“I think from the patient perspective we have a patient portal right now that is called Avera Chart. That will be transitioning to My Chart. That particular patient portal I would tell you is much more user friendly. It contains much more, I think practical health information from a patient’s perspective. I think the other part of that within the system, particularly for people that are not here year-round, there’s a part of the system that provides a portal to healthcare providers really around the country and around the world to access your data if you happen to be vacationing somewhere else or if you happen to live in warmer climates during the winter.”
Harrington adds there’s another advantage for going with the new system…
“Several years ago there was a real push to create and provide integration across healthcare providers because it’s really important. So there was some incentives and penalties about creating electronic health records systems that could be accessed across multiple providers. I think we’re starting to see the culmination of that. There are a lot fewer electronic health record providers I think because of some of that consolidation. I think that at the end of the day the ability to share data in an appropriate, secured way, has a potential to certainly increase patient safety, to decrease cost, to decrease duplication of services.”
Harrington notes LRH employees have undergone extensive training in advance of the new system launching May 30th.
