With the goal of helping health systems work more efficiently and find opportunities to reduce costs, global health care software company Epic has introduced Teamwork, part of the company’s effort to build a fully integrated enterprise resource planning tool.
Teamwork, the first application in EpicOps, the company’s integrated ERP suite specifically designed for health care, will help organizations manage clinician and staff scheduling, exam room use, and other resource planning tasks in the same system they use to care for patients.
With this new application, schedules and resource usage are visible in real time across the whole organization.
For patients, this capability can mean faster care experiences, according to Epic software users.
“We used to have a significant lag time between when changes in provider availability were made and when they showed up on the on-call schedule,” James Blum, chief health information officer at University of Iowa Health Care, said in a press release. “With Teamwork, the schedule integrates well with our existing systems, updating in real time so nurses, care coordinators, and other staff can consult with an available physician sooner.”
Elsewhere, Teamwork helps clinicians at Dubai Health spend less time on schedule coordination and more time with patients. Dubai Health is the first organization to implement Teamwork for nursing and the first health system outside the U.S. to adopt EpicOps.
Founded in a basement in 1979 with three half-time employees, Epic now supports health care organizations in 16 countries, with more than 3,500 hospitals using Epic and over 195 million patients using Epic’s MyChart patient portal to manage their care online.
In the future, EpicOps’ supply chain management capabilities aim to help global health systems predict supply needs based on their upcoming surgery schedules, preventing delays in care and reducing waste.
Aparna Sridhar, Epic’s vice president of EpicOps, points to a future in which EpicOps will help leaders compare costs and outcomes more easily — seeing not just what a procedure costs, but whether patients who receive it go home sooner or are less likely to be readmitted.
“That context will help health systems reduce costs while improving patient care,” Sridhar said in a press release.
