The University of Alabama (UA) System Board of Trustees unanimously approved plans for the UAB Health System to transition to a new electronic health record (EHR) platform, EPIC, for electronic health records, revenue cycle, and clinical research functions.
“I believe that this will be a great opportunity to move our clinical enterprise forward and enable us to collect more and better data for patient care and research,” said James Cimino, M.D., chair of the UAB Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science. “There will be new opportunities to advance UAB’s efforts to establish a true learning health system for bringing evidence-based knowledge to the point of care for all patients.”
EPIC will be implemented across all UAB Health System entities, including the newly acquired Ascension St. Vincent’s. The platform will allow patients’ data and medical records to be accessible across the UAB Health System, regardless of where patients are treated. It will also streamline the process for care providers, administrators, and support staff.
“I am excited that EPIC is coming to UAB as this will allow us to potentially implement nearly real-time natural language processing in the cloud to identify phenotypes of interest in all UAB-related entities including St. Vincent’s,” said John Osborne, Ph.D., associate professor.
EPIC is viewed as an opportunity by the department to invest in a single EHR that ultimately will improve on ways to provide efficient healthcare.
“EPIC’s Cosmos database, with de-identified data from roughly 100 million patients, provides a valuable resource for examining the real-world use of medicines across vast patient cohorts, including many rare disorders,” said Jake Chen, Ph.D., founding director of the Systems Pharmacology AI Research Center (SPARC). “This dataset can be leveraged for drug repurposing research and serves as a starting point for AI-enabled drug discovery, allowing us to hypothesize and optimize novel drug candidates more efficiently.”
UAB’s transition to EPIC as the new electronic health record (EHR) system will open several opportunities for clinical informatics innovation.
“EPIC is a lead promoter of informatics standards such as Substitutable Medical Applications & Reusable Technologies (SMART) and clinical decision support,” said Tiago Colicchio, Ph.D., assistant professor. “Innovation in the clinical informatics arena has progressively transitioned from health systems that traditionally employed full-time informatics researchers in their IT departments, to academic medical centers and their respective academic departments, where informatics researchers are now trying to leverage commercial EHRs to advance research and innovation.”
The project’s budget is approximately $380 million, which will cover implementation, some labor components, and operations over a seven-year period. To learn more click here.