Complete Technology Overhaul Costs Mayo Clinic $1.5 Billion

The Mayo Clinic Health System's $1.5 billion EHR rollout will affect thousands of employees nationwide.

This article was originally published on July 20, 2017, on the Association of Clinical Documentation Improvement Specialists.

The Mayo Clinic Health System recently began a $1.5 billion electronic health record (EHR) rollout which will affect all 70 of the system’s facilities and 51,000 employees across the country, according to Fierce Healthcare.

The system until recently used a combination of two EHR programs—a situation many CDI specialists may bemoan—but the Wisconsin facilities have now begun the consolidation to Epic’s EHR.

Though this change is projected to take until October 2018 for the whole system, the transition aims at much more than simply a unified EHR system-wide.

 “It is a whole technology information system upgrade. That includes the revenue cycle, network upgrades, security upgrades,” said Timothy Johnson, MD, regional vice president for Mayo Clinic Health System, in an interview with the Post Bulletin.

As the health system sets out on this year-and-a-half process, they anticipate a lot of education and training for the Mayo Clinic employees. To aid in this process, the system has set up a headquarters for the transition in Rochester, Wisconsin, across from one of their facilities.

Prior to this headquarters installation, more than 8,000 employees at the Wisconsin sites—the first to rollout the new system—went through weeks of training. This training took a toll on the facilities as the training took up every office and conference room available, according to Johnson and the Post Bulletin.

While any EHR rollout takes a fair amount of capital investment, much of the approximately $1.5 billion budget for the Mayo Clinic project will go to the system’s own staff for design input and configuration.