OhioHealth spending $229M to install electronic medical records

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Hospitals and providers are increasingly focusing on the ability to share patient records with one another.

Carrie Ghose

Staff reporter- Columbus Business First

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OhioHealth Corp. is spending $229 million this year and next to install unified electronic medical records across all 11 hospitals and offices encompassing 700 doctors.

Epic Systems Corp. records went live starting this June in physician practices first. Conversions at hospitals – replacing several legacy vendors – start in February with OhioHealth Grant Medical Center in downtown Columbus.

OhioHealth Riverside Methodist Hospital, largest in the system, goes live in June to coincide with the opening of its neuroscience tower expansion. Conversion should be substantially complete by September.

"We are going big bang with this," Vinson Yates, CFO and Senior Vice President, told me in a visit to his office.

Interestingly, 'big bang' was the term rival Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center applied to its installation of records by Verona, Wisconsin-based Epic two years ago. Mount Carmel Health System made a systemwide switch to Cerner Corp. records in 2012.

OhioHealth's investment affected operating margins for the year that ended June 30, and the impact will carry into this fiscal year too, said Nathan VanLaningham, senior vice president of finance,

"We decided to roll that out across the enterprise to defragment the care and that was a really expensive endeavor," he said.

OhioHealth has collected nearly $30 million in federal stimulus payments for its existing electronic records, but that program ends in 2016. It's not yet clear the financial as well as clinical benefit the system realizes from having doctors and hospitals on the same system.

"When we take most things to the board that are large expenditures, we take them forward with an intentional return on investment," Yates said.

Carrie Ghose covers health care, startups and technology for Columbus Business First.