Covenant Celebrates 10 Years Since It’s EMR Go-Live

Covenant HealthCare was the first hospital in the region to convert the entire organization over to an electronic medical record (EMR) system ten years ago.

In 2007, Covenant invested more than $25 million into this project in order to improve patient safety and satisfaction, staff and physician efficiency, and improved quality of care. Today, patients continue benefitting from this investment.

Here’s what took place:

July 2007: Physician offices go-live
August 2007: Hospital-wide training began for approximately 5,000 employees, physicians, students and volunteers 
Fall 2007: September 29 kicked-off hospital go-live, which included scheduling, billing, registration, pharmacy, clinical documentation and release of information.

For roughly a year, 50 medical professionals from across disciplines committed to designing, building and integrating EMR at Covenant using the Epic system.

Today, IT continues to train thousands of doctors, advanced care practitioners, nurses, clinicians and staff, while keeping nearly 200,000 patients safe. The connectedness helps in the exchange of lifesaving information between providers and medical facilities.

Since 2011, Covenant has used Care Everywhere, a function of Epic that allows exchanging of records between providers, no matter which EMR they use. Wherever patients go, their charts go with them. Since implementation, we have exchanged 2,827,037 records with organizations spanning all 50 states.

In addition, MyChart now allows Covenant patients to access their own medical records on smart phones, tablets and computers. Currently, 37,036 people use the MyChart application.

“Covenant is a leader in identifying and implementing innovation that supports Extraordinary Care for Every Generation,” said IT Director, Frank Fear. “To be one of the first health systems in the state to implement Epic 10 years ago is just one example of our dedication to implementing patient centric innovation.”

Covenant would like to thank all who have played a role in implementing this technology, and for the continued work that goes in to using it.