Becker's Hospital Review

35 CIO / HEALTH IT AdventHealth's Epic install expenses hit $355M last year By Laura Dyrda A ltamonte Springs, Fla.-based AdventHealth continued efforts to implement Epic EHR across its system last year, and aims to finish the final two waves of go-lives in the first and third quarters of 2023. Terry Shaw, president and CEO of AdventHealth, touched on its One Epic journey to unify the health system's EHR during his presentation at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in early January. e health system includes 51 hospitals, more than 100 ambulatory sites and 35- plus post-acute sites. AdventHealth first announced plans to transition to the Epic EHR in February 2020 and said a year later the project was expected to cost around $660 million. Mr. Shaw reported the Epic implementation expenses for 2022 through November were $355 million. Excluding Epic, the health system reported 9.3 percent EBITDA and 3.5 percent operating margins for 2022. So far the health system has 80 percent of its revenue base on Epic. n Study: Healthcare ransomware attacks doubled in five years By Giles Bruce The annual number of healthcare ransomware attacks more than doubled from 2016 to 2021, threatening patient safety and outcomes, a Dec. 29 study in JAMA Health Forum found. The number of incidents increased from 43 in 2016 to 91 in 2021, disrupting care delivery about half the time, according to the cohort study of 374 ransomware attacks that affected nearly 42 million patients. Hospitals were the organizations most likely to have their operations disrupted by the events, the report found. The cyberattacks are growing in their "frequency and sophistication," wrote the study's authors, who are from Minneapolis- based University of Minnesota and University of Florida in Gainesville. n Northern Light Health shifts 1,400 employees to Optum By Alexis Kayser B rewer, Maine-based Northern Light Health is transferring 1,400 of its employees to Eden Prairie, Minn.-based health services company Optum, the Portland Press Herald reported Jan. 5. The office-based employees — including those in revenue cycle management, information systems, inpatient care management, analytics, project management and supply chain roles — will keep their jobs, although they will now be employees of Optum rather than Northern Light Health. Their pay and benefits will not be cut, and they will not have to transfer out of Maine. Tim Dentry, the health system's president and CEO, told the newspaper they were looking to cut costs due to "unsettled" economic forecasts for hospitals. By outsourcing billing and support operations to Optum, the health system expects to save $1 billion over 10 years. "Nobody was going to save the day for us in healthcare," Mr. Dentry told the Press Herald. "This decision by Northern Light is going to take a huge amount of pressure off of individual entities like [Eastern Maine Medical Center, a hospital parented by the health system]." n

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