Former St. Anthony's Locations Complete Transition to Mercy's EHR

Today’s health care industry generates an incredible amount of data, with hospitals’ electronic health record (EHR) systems often managing petabytes of patient information.

When Mercy announced its affiliation with St. Anthony’s Medical Center in February 2017, planning began almost immediately on the complex process of transferring St. Anthony’s patient data and switching to Mercy’s EHR system, Epic. Led by Mercy’s IT division Mercy Technology Services (MTS), the process of integrating the former St. Anthony’s locations wrapped up in late September, with the switch happening the same day St. Anthony’s was re-christened Mercy Hospital South.

Throughout the process, Mercy experts dedicated more than 120,000 hours on the complex process of converting Mercy South’s three different medical record databases over to Mercy’s award-winning Epic EHR system. All the medical records for Mercy South’s 1.25 million patients, both current and historical, are now housed in a single, unified system, and they can be accessed by Mercy providers across its four-state network, which makes health care delivery significantly simpler.

“This transition not only benefits our patients, it positively impacts our more than 3,500 hospital and clinic co-workers as well,” said Kadi Montez, MTS’s vice president of business partnerships and previously the head of information systems at St. Anthony’s. “Working from a single EHR makes providing patient care far less complicated for everyone involved. For that, and for the efforts of all the MTS co-workers who made this possible, everyone at Mercy South is tremendously grateful.”

The conversion to Mercy’s Epic EHR was one of the final major IT milestones on the road to integrating the former St. Anthony’s locations into Mercy. In the months since the affiliation was announced, more than 4,000 computer workstations have been replaced, with almost 300 software systems either replaced or integrated into the Mercy system.

Recently, Mercy’s EHR was awarded Magna Cum Laude distinction on Epic’s Honor Roll – a program designed to celebrate health care systems for adopting industry-leading best practices, maintaining optimized technology infrastructure and using the system’s latest modules and upgrades. By converting to Mercy’s EHR, Mercy South gains access to one of the most robust, fully optimized implementations of Epic in use today – a version of Epic that MTS also provides to hospitals outside of Mercy as part of a full suite of commercial health care IT services.