Epic Installation Proves More Expensive

MaineHealth to invest an extra $55M for already-costly system

Bringing the total cost to $200 million, the parent company of Maine Medical Center will be spending tens of millions more on training for its problematic Epic electronic health record implementation.

This summer, we reported on the financial woes at Maine's largest hospital, whose rollout of an Epic EHR had not gone as planned. Maine Medical Center, part of the MaineHealth network, had already spent more than $145 million on the system, but several months into the project, problems cropped up – mostly related to charge capture.

In a letter obtained in May by Healthcare IT News, Maine Med's President and CEO Richard W. Peterson revealed that, thanks to those billing issues, as well as declining patient volumes, the hospital had sustained a $13.4 million operating loss over the first half of its fiscal year.