Standardization: A Key Benefit of the UH Epic Electronic Health Record

UH Clinical Update | June 2022

One of the nine UH Epic program guiding principles is “Achieve Systemness and Standardization.” With an organization as complex as UH, achieving “systemness” is no small feat. But the UH Epic program team is focused on ensuring a superior patient experience by engaging appropriate representation of caregivers from the system of care model as key workflow and process decisions are made. Read more about how standardization will be achieved through the implementation of our new Epic electronic health record (EHR).

Utilization of the UH Epic EHR, when uniformly practiced, will help us achieve our collective goal of “zero harm”. It also allows for increased revenue capture, more precise medical records, better compliance with standards, and improved efficiency. Standardization to our best practices will improve patient safety, care and outcomes, and can result in reduced care costs.

One way that we are working toward this goal is through standardization of order sets. UH Provider Order Set Leads have been identified for 50 subspecialty groups and these leads are driving efforts to reduce our existing 4,000 order sets to a streamlined 350 recommended in our UH Epic Foundation build.

To accomplish this goal, UH physician specialty reviewers and pharmacists are reviewing, building and validating order sets in Epic, focusing first on inpatient order sets. UH will advance by using Epic SmartSets in ambulatory settings to collect related orders and diagnoses that are appropriate for a specific patient situation. Grouping orders into SmartSets, order sets, express care or other panels simplifies the ordering process because clinicians do not need to search for each order they want to place.  

For more information on the UH Epic program – the Best Epic Implementation of All Time – visit it.uhhospitals.org/Epic.