Ready for What’s Next in Epic? Start With What’s Underneath.

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

You’ve seen the demos. You’ve explored the latest capabilities. You can already picture exactly where they might make a meaningful difference across your health system.

Then you ask your IT team what it would actually take to turn them on.

The answer starts with, “Well, first…”

First, there’s an ambulatory workflow to revisit. A custom configuration to review. A few tangled dependencies to sort through. And someone needs to figure out how the build decisions made two upgrades ago affect what your health system does next.

Suddenly, that exciting new capability comes with a substantial prerequisite list.

That is where the Epic Refuel conversation gets real. Before your health system can advance, you need to understand what is happening underneath, and who has the time in a standard workweek to do the heavy lifting.

How Yesterday’s Decisions Shape Today’s Epic Options

An Epic environment is a digital mirror of the organization that built it. Departmental quirks, specialized local workflows, health system mergers, and years of well-intentioned optimizations all leave their fingerprints on how the system runs day to day.

At the time, most of those custom builds solved legitimate, urgent problems. A department needed a workaround, an operational team needed a specialized template, or a newly acquired hospital needed a fast bridge into the main instance. But as an EHR evolves, maintaining heavy layers of customization turns into an operational drag. Every quarterly upgrade demands extra regression testing, and adopting next-generation functionality suddenly requires weeks of custom troubleshooting.

Epic’s Foundation System provides standardized, vetted configurations and workflows that health systems can build on rather than starting from scratch. When your build drifts far from Foundation standards, your analysts spend less time driving value and more time untangling custom configurations.

“Those standard workflows are what Epic uses to test new functionality and new builds. If a new piece of functionality needs to check a flowsheet row and you’re using Foundation, it’s already set up to look at that specific row. If you’re using a custom build, you have to figure out what you called that row and hook it up. Then every time there’s an update to that functionality, you have to go back and do the same thing.” 

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

That dynamic sits at the heart of an Epic Refuel: taking an honest look at where your system can return to Foundation standards, identifying where customization still makes clinical sense, and simplifying the rest. The real scope of the project always depends on your starting point, which means leaders must audit their technical debt before committing to aggressive timelines.

Connect EHR Readiness to a Specific Clinical Goal

Telling an IT steering committee that you need to “prepare the EHR for AI” is far too abstract to build an executable roadmap.

A productive initiative starts with the concrete outcomes your organization wants to achieve and the clinical headaches you need to relieve. Whether that means implementing ambient clinical documentation to cut down on pajama time or standardizing ordering across ambulatory sites, specific goals give your team clear direction.

Once the destination is clear, your team can collaborate directly with Epic to identify the workflow and technical prerequisites across three key areas:

• Configuration clean-up: Pinpointing which outdated screens, navigators, and preference lists need modernization.
• Workflow standardization: Evaluating where standardizing clinical pathways saves clicks versus where regional variances truly require distinct configuration.
• Clinical engagement: Determining how much testing, validation, and training time your physicians and operational leaders must contribute to make the change stick.

A successful Refuel addresses those system requirements head-on, but it must also account for the human element: the analysts expected to carry the load.

The Analysts Who Know Your System Best Already Have Full-Time Jobs

Your internal EHR analysts know far more than basic configuration. They carry your organization’s institutional memory. They remember why an oncology order set was built differently, which department chairs need to weigh in on template changes, and where a tiny adjustment in Cadence might disrupt billing downstream in Resolute.

That institutional context makes them indispensable to a Refuel project. The catch? That exact same expertise makes them indispensable to your daily operations.

Support tickets don’t pause because you’re standardizing workflows. Routine maintenance, break-fixes, incoming provider requests, and quarterly updates march forward regardless of modernization goals. Without a plan for operational coverage during an Epic Refuel, your best analysts end up juggling Refuel milestones alongside daily support tickets.

The inevitable result is divided focus, project bottlenecks, and exhausted talent.

Plan Team Capacity Alongside Project Scope

Workforce planning cannot be an afterthought in an EHR modernization project; it belongs on page one of your Refuel roadmap.

Begin by mapping your team’s real capacity against project needs:

1. Identify the core contributors: Determine which internal analysts hold the critical institutional knowledge needed for workflow design, governance, and stakeholder alignment.
2. Quantify the project hours: Estimate the weekly time commitments those analysts must spend in discovery, design sessions, validation, and build work.
3. Carve out operational coverage: Clearly define which baseline support functions can be delegated to external support so your internal team can dedicate uninterrupted focus to the Refuel.

That’s where Medix Technology’s healthcare IT staffing solutions can help. Dedicated operational support creates the capacity your seasoned internal analysts need to lead modernization projects without dropping the ball on user support.

New EHR capabilities are within reach when health systems invest in both technical alignment and the workforce capacity to see it through.

Build the Capacity to Fuel What’s Next in Epic

Planning an Epic Refuel or preparing your EHR for emerging clinical capabilities?Let’s discuss how to stabilize daily operations while freeing your analysts to build what comes next.

Connect With Medix Technology