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Members of UK Information Technology Services and UK HealthCare attended the annual Epic User Group Meeting (UGM). UGM’s annual conference brings together IT and operational leaders from across the globe to learn how to maximize the value of Epic as an electronic health record (EHR) software. These leaders also learned about the new innovations that will soon be available in the Epic strategic roadmap, which heavily focused on AI innovations this year.  

Like most conferences, participants have the opportunity to present success stories and share their learned experiences.  This year, Epic accepted two presentations from the University of Kentucky. “The Very Hungry Nurse Manager: A Phased Approach to Thrive Training” and “Getting to Happily Ever After: Implementation of An Effective Prioritization Strategy to Meet the Data Needs of an Organization.”

“The Very Hungry Nurse Manager: A Phased Approach to Thrive Training” was presented by Gillian Puscas, the IT Training Director, and Jessica Collins, Chief Nursing Information Officer.  Puscas and Collins presented an innovative approach to training inpatient nurse managers, assistant nurse managers and Clinical Nurse Specialists. In their presentation, they highlighted a statistically significant increase to nursing staff rating their skills in the EHR software (.88 higher on average from a 5-point scale), a 75% increase in efficiency dashboard views and a 4% increase in actions towards best practice advisories.

“Getting to Happily Ever After: Implementation of An Effective Prioritization Strategy to Meet the Data Needs of an Organization” was presented by Roshan Hussain (Chief Data Officer), Jennifer Rose (Senior Associate Vice President for Chandler Expansion & Performance Improvement) and Chris Burton (Business Intelligence Director). They presented a pragmatic implementation of a prioritization strategy to meet the data needs of UK HealthCare, how they established prioritization councils, and tools to use for unexpected requests. Their success story highlighted an improvement in projects being completed on time from 50% to over 93%. Their results also showed a sixfold drop in ticket backlogs--350 tickets decreased to 65.

Overall, the University of Kentucky and UK HealthCare were well represented at the conference, with employees coming together to learn and develop their skills.