In less than a year and a half, UConn Health will be using a new integrated electronic medical records system that will enable patient information to seamlessly and securely follow patients wherever they go, both within and outside of UConn Health.

Informally known as “Epic,” which is the name of the vendor, UConn Health has adopted the name “HealthONE” for this suite of applications designed to make the delivery of health care safer and more efficient.

A team of 100 specially trained employees and consultants has been working on the intricate 23-month undertaking to program HealthONE for UConn Health since May. The project is in the “adoption and build” phase, which is nearing the end of its second wave next month. Here is where a lot of the configuration takes place.

“In the scheduled Dec. 13 through 15 Adoption 2 session, we will be pulling in managers and subject matter experts from across the clinical and financial organizations to look at the dashboards that will help them manage our patient care, quality measures, and financial results,” says Roberta Luby, assistant vice president for HealthONE. “We will also discuss the reports that will be available out of the system, and determine which reports they are going to need to manage their day when we go live.”

For example, a dashboard tool could aggregate data on admitted patients that today may take several hours a day to identify and analyze. The time saved then can be spent on caring for patients, ensuring safety and improving outcomes.

“We’re going to show them what that dashboard might look like, where that information might show up, and what quality measures are available, and let them decide what kind of data they need to see, how often, and when,” Luby says.

Major milestones achieved to date include completion of the direction phase, where current and potential future workflows were reviewed, and the certification of 80 members of the HealthONE team.

Next after the adoption and building phase is the testing phase, an eight-month period starting next May that involves running thousands of scenarios to make sure the system is designed and operating as intended. During that time, a team of trainers also will be working to prepare the training materials and plan the training logistics.

The timeline calls for end-user training to start in early 2018, two-to-three-months before HealthONE goes live in April 2018.

“This system will establish one patient record whether the individual is coming to the ED, an outpatient clinic, or has an admission in the hospital,” Luby says. “It’s going to allow us to see everything that occurred on that patient and have one view into his or her allergies, medications, procedures and immunizations, allowing safe, efficient care regardless of where that patient is in our care environment.”

HealthONE also will allow the exchange of patient information with other EMR, enabling UConn Health to send and receive data from other hospitals and practices that may be using a different system.

“We’ll be able to assemble all the data needed for a patient to enable a provider to care for that patient safely,” Luby says.