Verona, Wisconsin.-based Epic Systems Corp. has formed their first academics informatics program partnership with Oregon Health & Science University for medical informatics education and research purposes. OHSU is the first academic informatics program to partner with Epic that both hope will accelerate practical application of electronic health record technology and hands-on learning.As part of the partnership, Epic will build two laboratory installations of its EpicCare EHR and provide the school access to Epic’s source code, Healthcare IT News reports.
Epic plans to install two separate EpicCare servers, one for research and one for education that will be run through OHSU’s Informatics Discovery Lab. Currently, OHSU Healthcare system already runs EpicCare on the hospital and clinics side, while the teaching side uses open source VistA for its EHR laboratory course. According to the OHSU announcement, the two EpicCare environments will:
allow OHSU faculty and students to investigate usability, data analytics, simulation, interoperability, patient safety and other research topics. It also will enable the prototyping of solutions to real-world health care problems that can be addressed by informatics technology
provide students in OHSU’s graduate program in biomedical informatics access to EpicCare for learning purposes. Students in both OHSU’s on-campus and distance learning programs will pursue coursework based on Epic’s electronic health record system.
To avoid any HIPAA related issues, the educational system will only house test data while the research system may work with live patient records that has been approved by OHSU’s institutional review board for specific research projects.
William Hersh, MD
“The Epic partnership gives us the opportunity to do the kind of informatics work we want to do. This includes teaching clinical decision support, system configuration and reports generation to graduate students in medical informatics as well as conducting EHR usability research. Historically, usability research, data standards work, etc., have mostly been done in home-grown [academic EHR] systems. Having a commercial system work with is “kind of a new chapter in informatics research,” said William Hersh, MD, chair of the Department of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology at OHSU in Portland, Ore.
Hersch is planning to have the technology ready in time to offer an EHR lab course starting in spring 2014 and ramp up the program over the next year.
