Epic has broad ambitions to expand its capabilities beyond the electronic health record to tackle workforce management, supply chain and financial operations.
The company is working to build a natively integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite exclusively for healthcare operations that will collect financial, operational and clinical data in one unified system. The ERP will integrate with Epic's EHR so schedules and resource usage are visible in real-time across the whole organization, according to Aparna Sridhar, Epic's vice president of EpicOps.
The first application to roll out of EpicOps is Teamwork, a clinician and staff scheduling and resource planning module that features real-time, pattern-driven and assignment-aware scheduling capabilities.
For health systems, staff scheduling is a complex puzzle that often involves disconnected, manual processes.
Teamwork isn't a standalone scheduling tool as it's part of the same system that runs patient care, Sridhar noted. Teamwork updates on-call assignments in real time, so when a critical result comes in or a patient needs coordination, staff can reach the right clinician immediately through Secure Chat.
Teamwork also integrates with Epic’s Cadence scheduling so when a provider picks up a new clinic shift, the system automatically opens appointment slots on the schedule. With Fast Pass, those slots can be offered automatically to patients waiting for an earlier appointment, according to Sridhar.
Epic's scheduling and resource management application can reduce administrative effort and operational costs, speed up care coordination and deliver better care for patients, Sridhar asserts.
There are five healthcare organizations currently live with Teamwork, which was released in November 2024, and 11 more organizations are actively installing it, according to Epic.
“We used to have a significant lag time between when changes in provider availability were made and when they showed up on the on-call schedule,” said James Blum, M.D., Chief Health Information Officer at University of Iowa Health Care, a health system that has gone live with the Teamwork application. “With Teamwork, the schedule integrates well with our existing systems, updating in real time so nurses, care coordinators, and other staff can consult with an available physician sooner.”
For nursing, Teamwork looks at how many patients are expected and how complex their care needs are likely to be over the next two weeks, and it can flag when a unit will need more staff, according to Sridhar. Any updates to scheduled shifts happen in real time, so patients can be reassigned to a new clinician if their original caregiver calls in sick, she noted.
Dubai Health is the first organization to implement Teamwork for nursing and the first health system outside the U.S. to adopt EpicOps. The Teamwork application makes the organization's scheduling more streamlined and more sophisticated, said Sattar Alshryda, Ph.D., clinical head of trauma and orthopaedic surgery at Dubai Health.
New EpicOps capabilities are being rolled out gradually with time and attendance functions coming in August, Sridhar said. Credentialing and cost accounting modules within the EpicOps ERP suite are expected to roll out in mid-2027. Supply chain and financial functions will roll out at the end of next year, followed by HR and payroll functions, she noted.
Epic plans to add supply chain management capabilities to EpicOps to enable health systems to predict supply needs based on their upcoming surgery schedules, preventing delays in care and reducing waste.
"There's going to be three phases of release, with the first phase of release everything that you can consider almost like an add-on to an ERP, which is your scheduling, credentialing functions, cost accounting, things you typically do outside of a traditional ERP system. Then we're going to get into the core portions of the ERP in future phases," Sridhar said.
With the integrated ERP platform, Epic intends to bring a larger portion of a health system’s operational backbone into the Epic ecosystem, and it also strategically aligns with the company's AI roadmap.
A few years ago, healthcare customers were requesting a staff scheduling module that integrates with Cadence, Epic's scheduling tool used to schedule and track patient appointments, while also helping to manage capacity and reduce administrative burden, Sridhar said.
"Our vision for ERP is essentially to help customers with that need to address workflow shortages, supply shortages, thin operating margins and operating as efficiently as possible in this environment," Sridhar said.
Parkview Health, a 15-hospital health system serving Indiana and northwest Ohio, has gone live with the Teamwork module and has seen the benefits of integrating staff scheduling within one platform, Mark Mabus, M.D., Parkview’s chief medical information officer, told Fierce Healthcare.
"One thing we've definitely seen is such a disparate method of scheduling across our system, multiple third parties that we've used, Excel spreadsheets, even just plain old paper across the system," Mabus said. "Everyone that uses Epic can be scheduled in Epic now on Teamwork so that from a clinical and end-user perspective, keeping them in one system as the source of truth for not only their day-to-day work but also their scheduling really helps efficiency, cuts down on friction, makes that user experience with the software just so much better, leading to decreased burnout and decreased frustration."
Mabus added, "Ultimately, this will be a cost savings for us as we are able to consolidate down to just the Epic product."
Parkview Health also has reported significant administrative time savings. “It takes us 75% less time to build provider schedules thanks to Teamwork’s templates, real-time coverage views, and direct Epic integration,” Mabus said.
He added, "Going obviously from paper and Excel to a program where you can set up rules and patterns in scheduling just made things so much easier for them to get done more quickly."
Teamwork also can improve scheduling and coordination among non-clinical staff, Mabus noted. "There's a shift marketplace that the users can sign up or take the shifts that they want and submit those to a reviewer. It's all doing this electronically rather than through emails or other slower processes. It's really been efficient for the people managing schedules, but it's efficient for the users too. The visibility into scheduling is so easy that it's really improved their experience too," he said.
Rolling out the Teamwork module across an entire health system can take six to nine months, with the first staffing group live in three to four months, Sridhar noted.
"We usually work with a very small set of early adopters, we learn from these experiences and we do it in waves, and now we can do up to 50 staffing groups of providers in three to four months," she said.
In addition to staff scheduling, Teamwork shows hospitals how they use exam rooms by day and by provider, revealing unused capacity that can be used to see patients sooner. A health system can see how its physical space is actually being used and that enables them to onboard new providers and increase patient access with the space they already have, Sridhar noted.
"It's helpful because you can offload the capital expense of building or renting more space so it reduces cost and improves access for patients, because they can get seen sooner," she said.
"There are some of our specialty clinics where we've activated the room tracking functionality, and we're able to allocate those rooms to the providers who need them the most," Mabus said. "They are typically some of our busiest clinics and largest clinics, and you want to make sure that the throughput for patients matches the room availability."
As Epic continues to develop the EpicOps platform, Mabus expects there will be benefits to a healthcare-specific ERP integrated with a medical records system.
"The integration will help with some of the AI features, being able to have that one data source to pull from as its knowledge base to be able to surface insights across the system rather than just in a silo will be tremendously helpful. We have gone through some vendor consolidation processes in the past, and we have identified some of our key technology vendors for our system. We are definitely trying to consolidate to form an ecosystem with those trusted vendors, and then have our tools for use be able to cross coordinate as much as possible," Mabus said.
Parkview Health also is "fast and furious" with deploying Epic's generative AI functionalities across the health system, he noted.
As Epic builds out its ERP platform, it is going up against global ERP giants like Oracle, SAP, Workday and Dedalus, but the health IT company says its deep focus on healthcare is a key point of differentiation.
"Most ERPs in the market, maybe 10% to 15% of their focus is on healthcare, but 100% of our focus is on healthcare," Sridhar said. "The way we approach supply chain, for example, we will not just look at past usage of supplies to predict what future use is going to look like, we can natively integrate with upcoming surgery schedules. We can look at at, 'How do we predict census to look like?' So, based on that, we can say when are you likely to encounter a shortage and how can you avert that, either through delays in patient care or stocking up or down? Having that connection really facilitates that on the supply chain side."
Sridhar points to a future in which EpicOps will help leaders compare costs and outcomes more easily—seeing not just what a procedure costs, but whether patients who receive it go home sooner or are less likely to be readmitted. “That context will help health systems reduce costs while improving patient care,” she said.