![]() ![]() Both of those systems also include specialist and family physician practices, but they point to just how expensive the NSW plan might be.Īnd what of the money already spent on eHealth in NSW? Very early versions of Cerner began being implemented in the early 2000s, with FirstNet going live in a flawed implementation in 2009 and many of those costs are unquantifiable. ![]() AdventHealth, with 50 hospitals and more than 8000 beds, spent $US650m flipping from Cerner to Epic in 2021. Mayo Clinic spent $US1.5b rolling it out to its 90 hospitals and clinics between 20. The most recent implementations of Epic in the US point to just how expensive it is likely to be. Figures they quoted ranged from half a million dollars to over a billion, considering the size of the project. Our experts tell us this is just a drop in the ocean when it comes to a statewide implementation, however. It received $141 million in the 2021-22 state budget, and had already received an undisclosed amount to pay for the new pathology system in the 2020-21 budget. It is a huge operation, stretching from enormous tertiary referral hospitals that are some of the largest in the country, several paediatric hospitals, and numerous metro and regional hospitals, both large and very small.ĮHealth NSW told us yesterday that funding had been secured for the project but was not at liberty to tell us how much this would cost, as it was still in contract negotiations with Epic. NSW Health, in contrast, has 220 hospitals supporting 9500 beds covering eight million patients, and it employs more than 120,000 people. The three-site Parkville project had under 1000 beds at an overall cost of $124 million in 2019.ĪCT Health’s project, which is on the same scale in terms of bed numbers but is bigger than Parkville as it includes pathology and PAS, came in at $151m over 10 years, of which Epic received $114m. RCH had about 300 beds when it chose Epic, for a cost of $48 million in 2016. NSW Health’s announcement this week, however, represents magnitudes in scale. ACT Health also decided to implement Epic’s pathology system and its PAS to replace legacy systems, despite neither of these platforms having been tested in the Australian context before. The model developed for Parkville was then expanded upon by ACT Health for its three hospitals, walk-in centres and community care centres. Epic is widely used in paediatric hospitals around the world so it was not surprising it was chosen, but so successful has the implementation been that it was subsequently adopted by the other three hospitals in what is now known as the Parkville precinct. Epic’s EMR was pioneered in Australia at Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne in 2016 in what has been a highly successful project. There are a couple of international vendors who could probably achieve something approaching this using contemporary data exchange standards and integration engines, but for whatever reason, NSW Health has decided to start again, ripping out the Cerner-based platform it has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into with Epic, not just for its EMR but for pathology and patient administration too. While Pulse+IT sources told us earlier this year that NSW Health was considering a single vendor approach, the initial tender for what it calls the Single Digital Patient Record (SDPR) envisioned a far more integrated system, floating the idea that a smart vendor could devise a single view accessing various clinical systems despite the source or the silo in one view of the patient. ![]() The massive program will represent the largest implementation of any EMR platform in the Southern Hemisphere and one of the largest Epic implementations in the world, covering 220 hospitals and eight million patients. The cost of flipping NSW Health’s electronic medical record platform from Cerner to Epic could cost up to $1 billion over 10 years, industry experts project.
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