Orlando (Fla.) Health is consolidating its newly acquired mainland U.S. hospitals to a single instance of Epic to save money from “economies of scale,” its IT chief told Becker’s.
The $9.9 billion organization launched the EHR at three Florida facilities in 2025, with plans to do the same at Birmingham, Ala.-based Baptist Health’s five hospitals in summer 2026. While four of the campuses are already on Epic, it wouldn’t make financial sense to keep them on a separate instance of the EHR. Baptist Health’s four Epic hospitals use a local data center, while Orlando Health’s platform is hosted by the EHR vendor.
“From a cost perspective, it would be cost-prohibitive to maintain those two different environments,” Novlet Mattis, senior vice president and chief digital and information officer of Orlando Health, told Becker’s. “We wouldn’t be taking advantage of the economies of scale if we kept them on two different systems.”
Orlando Health switched to Epic in 2021 and has since been transitioning hospitals it acquires to the single instance of the EHR.
The 24-hospital system recently went live with Epic at Orlando Health Sebastian (Fla.) River Hospital, Orlando Health Melbourne (Fla.) Hospital, Tampa-based Florida Medical Clinic Orlando Health. The eight-month implementation marked a “record time” for the health system, Ms. Mattis said.
There is a “significant capital outlay upfront” for the EHR integration with operational cost savings expected over five years, Ms. Mattis said. “We will only have one license for stuff. We will have one set of people doing maintenance.”
A single EHR instance also allows for standardized workflows and interfaces, stronger data governance and a unified view of data, and more accessible enterprise analytics for quality improvement, she said.
But even going from Epic to Epic requires change management. Different instances of the EHR often have different workflows, which clinicians have gotten used to. Data still has to be converted and mapped. “It’s actually harder to do an Epic-to-Epic migration than it is to do a Cerner-to-Epic migration,” Ms. Mattis said.
Orlando Health’s hospitals in Puerto Rico are on Meditech, but the health system is also building an enterprise data platform that will encompass its EHRs and enterprise resource planning systems, including Oracle.
When Orlando Health brought a hospital it bought in 2020 onto Epic, it took close to a year. But the health system now has an EHR install “playbook” that simplifies the process with concurrent workstreams, from lab integration to third-party contracting to testing.
“Each time we do it, we take the lessons learned and go back and keep improving our processes,” Ms. Mattis said.
The post Why Orlando Health is moving 4 hospitals to Epic — from Epic appeared first on Becker’s Hospital Review | Healthcare News & Analysis.
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