Dear Colleagues:

We are pleased to announce that Columbia, Weill Cornell Medicine, and NewYork-Presbyterian have signed a contract with Epic to create a single electronic health record (EHR) system across our three institutions.

The new system will make it easier and more efficient for our physicians and other clinical staff to deliver outstanding patient care. It will also integrate scheduling, billing, and revenue cycle tools into a single platform, replacing a range of outdated tools and providing new analytic capabilities.

This is a major commitment of time and resources for our institutions. Over the next four months, we will assemble a joint team of hundreds of faculty and staff from across Columbia, Weill Cornell Medicine, and NewYork-Presbyterian who will learn to build and operate the system. In 2018 and 2019, the team will identify best practices across our institutions, build and test the system, and begin to train end-users. Throughout the process, we will leverage the experience of Weill Cornell Medicine, which has used Epic for more than 15 years.

Weill Cornell Medicine will take the first step toward the shared EHR by moving its instance of Epic from New York into Epic hosting in Wisconsin in mid-2018. The first new implementation of our shared Epic system will take place in January 2020 at Columbia. Work will continue across Weill Cornell Medicine with upgrades to their existing Epic system, and across all of NYP, until the last go-live in January 2022.

One hallmark of a good, integrated EHR implementation is a commitment to identify best practices and then standardize them. We will need to plan, train, learn, and optimize together. If we commit to this approach, the benefits for our patients and everyone who works here will be enormous.

We look forward to this journey together and are committed to the work necessary to achieve our shared success.

Sincerely,

Augustine M.K. Choi, MD
Stephen and Suzanne Weiss Dean, Weill Cornell Medicine
Provost for Medical Affairs, Cornell University

Steven J. Corwin, MD
President and CEO
NewYork-Presbyterian

Lee Goldman, MD
Dean of the Faculties of Health Sciences and Medicine
Chief Executive, Columbia University Irving Medical Center