Your Epic Team Is Ready to Refuel. The Support Tickets Didn’t Get the Memo.

Jason Kulaga, RN, BSN, PMP, Practice Director, Healthcare Solutions, Medix Technology, recently shared his expertise and perspective to help shape the insights below.

Your analysts have an Epic Refuel kickoff circled on the calendar. Their support queues, on the other hand, are completely unimpressed.

Break-fix tickets keep piling up. Routine maintenance still demands hands on keyboards. Meanwhile, an urgent ping lands in an analyst’s inbox from a clinic manager asking for what is supposedly “just a quick change” to an order set.

At the same time, the very professionals who know your Epic environment inside and out are expected to lead your modernization charge.

For healthcare IT executives, this is where resource planning collides with operational reality. Your internal team holds irreplaceable institutional knowledge that makes a Refuel successful. But simply shifting those names onto a project charter does not magically assign their existing day jobs to anyone else.

Before the first project sprint begins, one question needs a clear answer: Who keeps daily operations moving while your internal team focuses on what comes next?

A Project Assignment Doesn’t Create Project Capacity

A resource spreadsheet can show that an analyst will dedicate 20 hours a week to a Refuel. Their daily reality usually tells a very different story.

They dial into a Foundation System workflow review, only to step out 10 minutes later to troubleshoot a billing interface glitch. They block off Thursday afternoon for Refuel configuration, then spend four uninterrupted hours resolving clinical change requests. By Friday afternoon, the operational fires are out, but the project deliverables haven’t budged.

That’s how a reasonable project assignment quickly turns into an unsustainable 65-hour work week.

To create meaningful capacity, leadership teams must look past static job descriptions and take an honest audit of what fills an analyst’s week:

• High-volume support queues across specific application modules
• Routine build updates, preference lists, and template clean-up
• Recurring maintenance, testing, and scheduled upgrade cycles
• Informal requests that bypass ticketing systems because someone “always asks Sarah”

Once that operational baseline is visible, leaders can make deliberate choices about what actually shifts off an analyst’s plate before Epic modernization work kicks off.

Put Your Internal Experts Where Their Knowledge Matters Most

Your veteran analysts understand far more than basic system configuration. They know why an ambulatory workflow was customized five years ago. They know which medical providers need to be in the room when an ordering screen changes, and they spot downstream dependencies before they break.

That institutional memory is pure gold during a Refuel. As your team audits legacy build to bring workflows closer to Foundation standards and prepares your Epic environment for emerging AI capabilities, those internal perspectives prevent costly mistakes.

Protecting that value means deciding what only your internal team can do. Clinical collaboration, governance, and complex workflow redesign require deep organizational roots. On the flip side, plenty of operational responsibilities can be handled by additional certified talent:

• Dedicated tier-2 and tier-3 break-fix triage
• Standard change tickets and routine build adjustments
• User provisioning and security template maintenance
• Regression testing for scheduled system updates

Drawing those lines early prevents competing priorities from forcing analysts to choose between today’s tickets and tomorrow’s rollout.

Where MedixFlex™ Creates Meaningful Breathing Room

Balancing daily operational stability with strategic modernization is critical.

Through MedixFlex™ Epic operational support, health systems deploy experienced, Epic-certified analysts to manage ongoing maintenance, ticket triage, and routine build tasks. This approach gives leadership the flexibility to protect service levels while freeing internal analysts to focus their deep institutional knowledge on Refuel milestones.

“Your own analysts want to work on the cool new Refuel. We’ll come in and do the boring stuff. We’ll answer the support tickets and do the routine build and maintenance to free up your team. That’s the question organizations need to answer: How are you going to keep the routine stuff going while the Refuel happens?” 

—Jason Kulaga, RN, BSN, PMP, Practice Director, Healthcare Solutions, Medix Technology

Rather than rushing a handoff,  these four steps make an operational backfill successful:

1. Define the operational perimeter: Establish explicit boundaries for the queues, modules, and ticket types covered by external support.
2. Standardize documentation and access: Ensure standard operating procedures are current and security permissions are active on day one.
3. Map clean escalation paths: Provide backfill talent with clear paths to escalate nuanced, site-specific issues without derailing project leads.
4. Clarify prioritization and review: Designate who reviews build quality and resolves conflicting clinical requests.

A structured handoff gives incoming analysts the context they need to operate independently, preventing your internal leads from remaining the unofficial owners of tickets they were supposed to surrender.

Give Analysts Room to Do the Work That Inspires Them

An Epic Refuel is both a technical upgrade and a professional development opportunity for your team.

Seasoned analysts often jump at the chance to redesign clunky interfaces, work directly with clinical leaders, and shape the modern EHR environment they will support for years to come. That work is engaging, high-impact, and rewarding.

However, that enthusiasm evaporates quickly when an exciting project is simply layered on top of an unyielding support queue.

Take the time to ask your analysts where they want to grow. Align their clinical interests with project tracks, and build an operational coverage strategy that gives them the uninterrupted focus to succeed. Meaningful skill growth requires time and realistic bandwidth, which makes capacity planning an essential retention strategy.

Check Whether the Capacity Plan Is Actually Working

Workforce plans should never be set in stone. Once the Refuel is underway, keep an eye on both project velocity and operational health:

• Are internal leads logging dedicated, uninterrupted hours on Refuel milestones?
• Are operational queues maintaining standard resolution times?
• Are escalations highlighting gaps in system documentation or onboarding?
• Is project work consistently spilling into nights and weekends?

If operational fires start creeping back into project hours, use those metrics to fine-tune your coverage model before fatigue sets in.

Your support tickets aren’t going to pause for a Refuel, but with the right workforce strategy, they won’t stand in the way of progress either.

Fuel What’s Next Without Dropping the Ball on Today

Preparing for an Epic Refuel or large-scale EHR modernization? Explore Medix Technology’s healthcare IT staffing solutions to see how we can help maintain daily operations while giving your internal analysts the capacity to tackle complex modernization projects.

Contact us to build your epic team