Mayo Clinic undertakes $1.5 billion project to unify electronic records management

Newswire: July 13, 2017.

Dateline: Rochester, Minn.

Mayo Clinic will embark on a $1.5 billion project to combine all of its electronic health records into one upgraded system.

The Post Bulletin of Rochester, Minn. reported today that  Mayo Clinic Health System, comprising numerous locations in several states, made the switch on Saturday to software by Epic Systems Corp. of Verona, Wis.

Mayo Clinic also has three campuses, in Arizona, Florida and its world-renowned main campus in Rochester.

Dr. Timothy Johnson, the regional vice president for Mayo Clinic Health System, called the change “absolutely a huge milestone. This is the first implementation of us all being on a single electronic record system.

“All of our workflows center around the movement of information, whether it’s a prescription or order a lab or getting a result back to the right person,” he added.

The change is rolling out in Mayo Clinic’s Wisconsin operations, which will be the testing ground for the operation under the name “Plummer Project.” That references Dr. Henry Plummer, one of the co-founders of the clinic in 1889, who was a pioneer in creating a central medical record system more than a century ago.

Mayo Clinic Health System locations in Minnesota will make the transition in November; the Rochester campus will do so by May 2018, and the systemwide change will be finished by October 2018.

The project so far has required the training of some 8,400 employees in Wisconsin, by 1,000 non-Mayo staffers. When the transition is completed, 51,000 employees across the U.S. will be trained in the system.

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(Front page image via Wikipedia.)