Worcester Business Journal

10 Worcester Business Journal | October 2, 2017 | wbjournal.com After two years and $650M, UMass Memorial has gone live with new electronic recordkeeping BY EMILY MICUCCI Worcester Business Journal Staff Writer H ospitals and outpatient offices owned by UMass Memorial Health Care reap the benefits of being associated with a large healthcare system, but until this week, access to state-of-the-art electronic med- ical records was not one of them. The system has been recording and accessing patient information using well over 100 software programs, and sharing information between departments has often been difficult, or impossible. "I'm kind of am starting with a blank slate, and it frustrates a lot of patients that we don't know anything about them when they've gotten their care throughout the UMass system," said John Palmgren, a long-time registered nurse in the emergency room of UMass Memorial Marlborough Hospital, one of the system's three hospitals. Palmgren's comments came two weeks ago, as he was busy training coworkers on the system's new Epic software plat- form, an electronic medical records solu- tion bringing previously disjointed patient records under one system. The new Epic system went live yesterday, Oct. 1, the date UMass Memorial execu- tives have been preparing for over the last two years. The project involved hiring hundreds of new information tech- nology employees and contract staff, and teaching select clinical staff, like Palmgren, how to use the software so they, in turn, can help train their peers. Up for a challenge Leading the charge on this $650-mil- lion project, which included upgrades to information-technology infrastructure across the system as well as the pur- chase and implementation of Epic, is Tim Tarnowski, the chief information officer for UMass Memorial. A sea- soned IT executive, Tarnowski took the job at UMass Memorial in November 2014, knowing that a revamp of the organization's IT system lay ahead. "I just love these types of challenges," Tarnowski said in an interview about three weeks before Epic went live. Tarnowski has held several roles as head of IT for hospital systems in the Midwest and in California, and he's led major IT transitions before. Each time, they've grown in scale, and Tarnowski said the UMass Memorial project is his largest yet. "Some people think this kind of stuff is fun, and I happen to be one of them," Tarnowski said. That doesn't mean it's easy. To orches- trate an IT change of this scale, UMass Memorial made a number of big moves, including building a new IT office on Front Street in downtown Worcester, hiring nearly 400 new staff members to the information systems department, and as many as 300 contract workers to support the implementation of Epic. Avoiding patient dangers It all began with a kickoff meeting in December 2014, when a steering com- mittee embarked on the challenge of finding an electronic medical records platform to make records sharing with- Tim Tarnowski, CIO, UMass Memorial Health Care Epic challenge UMass Memorial personnel train on the new Epic system in September, in anticipation of the electronic system's launch this past Sunday. Part of the Epic training involved simulating patient scenarios and using the new electronic system. P H O T O S / E D D C O T E

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