Epic Summary

Over the past several months, clinical leadership group members from ColumbiaDoctors, NewYork-Presbyterian, and Weill Cornell Medical, have identified a number of necessary roles such as the clinical leadership groups (CLGs), subject matter experts (SMEs), and access and revenue cycle readiness (ARCR) group members to complete the groundwork phase of this new system.

Our CLG group has representatives from both ColumbiaDoctors and NYP to ensure all clinical areas have representation. Our ColumbiaDoctors representatives included Ravi Shah, MD, and Colleen Cullen, PsyD. NYP representatives include Ryan Lawrence, MD for Emergency Department/CPEP, Piergiuseppe Fedele, MD for in-patient, Akhil Shenoy, MD for consultation liaison, Warren Ng, MD and Erica Chin, PhD for out-patient services, and Denise Leung, MD for quality management. These representatives will be reaching out to their team members to ensure all faculty, disciplines and areas have input to this process.

Our SMEs and ARCR group from ColumbiaDoctors includes members from our administrative team to ensure our operational workflows and revenue cycle needs are appropriately designed and implemented in EPIC. The Project Manager for these pieces is Andrea Rojas. 

EPIC has developed a process for designing and implementation.  The initial step was the direction setting sessions were the groups identify the goals and desired workflows followed by build decisions which were informed by the direction setting and lastly adoption sessions to review what has been built.  Psychiatry’s key clinical leaders are attending these adoption sessions to ensure that it supports our workflows and needs.  Some of the workflows we finalized included the Behavioral Health workflow in the Emergency Department, scheduling and documentation of Electroconvulsive Therapy workflow in Epic, Behavioral Health documentation (including diagnosis and treatment plan evaluation), patient confidentiality and compliance consideration, and Discharge/Readmit (including leave of absence workflows).

The Epic build is expected to be completed by January 2019 with an Epic go-live date of January 31, 2020.

Columbia Psychiatry nominated Operational Change Agents to assist throughout this process, including Amy Friedman, Andrea Rojas along with all of our practice managers and billing compliance manager to ensure all ColumbiaDoctors sites were represented. Their role is to work together to help at each site while we adopt to the foundation system.  They will be accountable to support the process of change and identify any gaps that need to be addressed post go-live with the help of the ColumbiaDoctors Change Management Team.

The next phase is Epic training, which will be organized by role and workflow. We are identifying super users who will provide go-live support for their peers and create a foundation for operational adoption of the system. End-User training is expected to occur starting December 2019 – January 2020.