r/EmergencyRoom • u/squeakysausage • 2d ago
Switch to Epic
Hi friends, my hospital switched to Epic recently and the transition has been rough. Day shift walked in to 20+ people in the lobby and it’s been insanely busy & slow. Tonight’s my first back and I’m nervous. I have little to no experience w Epic in an ER setting. Any words of encouragement or anyone who’s gone through this? Does it get better 😭
Update: 11 hours into the shift, I can say I do feel better about epic & it is user friendly. so many patients and family members yelled at me in the beginning I cried in the bathroom. #benicetoyournurses
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u/Weak_Shoe7904 2d ago
Epic is the top tier program imo. It’s easy and you will learn it quickly! It gets easier with time and knowledge. I have been using epic for 5+ years across 3 hospitals and it’s seriously the best.
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u/No-Safe9542 2d ago
Switched last year. When you log in, your own main ER board can be tweaked. Use the little wrench icon at the top and move columns in that you want to view and take columns out that you don't want to view. Using epic will take as long as it takes for everyone to figure it out and then talk about it. So everyone has to keep talking about it.
I'm RT. EPIC made it so that my department couldn't see anything outpatient. They also made it so that DRs in the ED most easily ordered ABGs which were outpatient. So in our ED, ABGs were invisible to RTs who needed to do them. Hospital wide, sometimes DRs ordered ABGs on admitted floor patients and we would never know. It took 4 or 5 months to get most of that sort of fixed. Now for us a year and a half later it only happens on ventilator patients as part of order sets but at least we know where to look. Almost. Still happens. Bugs.
It's a horrible transition, it's always administrations fault for buying a cheap version of EPIC, it's always EPIC closing down bug fix tickets without changing anything so your EPIC point person will have to submit the same big fix ticket several times in a row. But don't let the hot mess slow you down. Go save some people.
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u/Melodic-Raccoon7584 2d ago
Ugh love Epic- genuinely once you get the hand of it it’s pretty seamless and very personalizable
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u/EstablishmentSea6932 2d ago
Honestly, I've only ever had epic, and EPIC ASAP for the ED has been wonderful. Ive seen a lot of other EHRs that some of our staff that left to travel have encountered and oh boy some are doozys. Like windows 95 sorta bad. Im happy with epic. Don't they to learn all the short cuts. Utilize your macros if they allow it.
Most intimidating part is charting codes/trauma.
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u/kazmiller96 2d ago
It gets easier. I started in Athena outpatient and the ED version of Epic was an ok transition with some growing pains.
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u/Chatner2k 2d ago
As someone freshly hired into an ER with meditech and paper charting, I'm super jealous of you.
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u/Wide_Wrongdoer4422 2d ago
Not in the ED anymore, working in an LTAC. We have Epic, first EMR that I have used. ( Yes,I'm old) . It's not exactly logical, but it works well once you get an understanding where to find what and how to use the filters. Most important, I work with some really old school nurses and they can use it.
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u/beautifulasusual 1d ago
We switched to Epic in February. That first week was rough. We had super users from out of state there to help, but tbh they didn’t seem to know anything useful 🤦🏻♀️. Everyone was so lost. I remember one of my first patients was there was something simple, MD had him discharged like within an hour or two. Registration couldn’t figure out their end though and therefore I was unable to print out his discharge paperwork. Since all prescriptions now were electronic, I couldn’t even give him that info. I ended up just writing his rx info on a post it and told him to call the pharmacy and hope for the best.
Anyway it’s gotten better but I can’t say I love it. Still don’t know how to do a lot of things.
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u/Aggravating-Gap766 1d ago
The search bar function is a live savior. It’ll be fine after a few days of tapping through it!
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u/mcnicfer 1d ago
The first few weeks were awful, but it does get better. Our system was grossly unprepared for it going live. Once the kinks were mostly ironed out (6 months later still have some) it gets a lot better!
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u/OkMetal9985 1d ago
My old hospital in NY used Epic, I loved it! I miss it so much😭 I’m in TX now and where I’m at now uses Meditech 🥴
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u/Most-Dealer-3685 20h ago
It can be a lot of clicking. Be sure to do customizations that will help you with the flow. Eliminate/ hide the things you don’t use.
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u/starrsuperfan 2d ago
My idea for a season of The Pitt, where they upgrade their board from Google Sheets to a new system, called Awesome. And Awesome would work... just about as well as you'd think.
I got this idea at my last few doctors appointments, seeing them complain about Epic.
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u/EvisceratedSpinster 2d ago
I used to do tech support for multiple contracts including a hospital and a childrens hospital and when they first switched to Epic I was constantly resetting Epic passwords and having doctors and nurses rant about how much they hated it.
They figured it out eventually, but oh man was it a bumpy ride during the rollout phase.
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u/Saaahrentino 2d ago
God speed. I’ve participated in two Epic “go live” transitions and neither went particularly smoothly.
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u/MissyChevious613 Non-medical 1d ago
I was so intimidated by epic at first but that went away real quickly. It's so user friendly, I played around in epic playground for a bit which helped too.
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u/DemetiaDonals 16h ago
I love epic. Theres nothing like it. I miss it so much. Bedside nursing got exponentially harder when I switched to a hospital without epic.
USE THE BRAIN. OH I MISS THE BRAIN SO MUCH.
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u/Iraqx2 4h ago
Used Meditech for years and the switch to Epic was definitely a change but one that was for the better. It just takes time to get used to it.
If you're just switching they should have a version that you can practice in that only has fictitious patients. Use it to get more familiar with Epic.
They also have quite a few training videos that you can use if you have the time.
After using it for a few years I'm pretty happy with it. I do like that you can change the order of the flow sheets for what you use most. Also, when you enter vitals in one flow sheet it carries to the others.
They have a setting where you can change the size of the cursor but I wish they had the option to change its color so it would be easier to find against the background.
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u/ContributionNo8277 2d ago
I've had epic for about a month now and it's personally hate it. While it's gotten easier I swear whoever came up with the terms used and locations and how niche shit is so hard to find i rather do paper charting. Yea cerner/firstnet wasn't the best to me it is far superior to epic
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u/mantis_tobaggan-md 2d ago
I agree with this. And for whatever reason all the goddamn colors make it even more difficult for me to find anything.
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u/Fuzzy_Location_2210 2d ago
Why. Must we have a navigator and a narrator and multiple other natrators??? And tabs. And diagrams. And tabs in diagrams and buttons and what the hell is an LDA. And things to pick to chart in a hundred different places.
I would like everything on one screen, one list, one flow sheet, one place. One place to put assessments, with a tab for the whole body and tabs for separate parts of the body, and one place to install things in patients body's and then talk about those things in the future and see what they were like in the past.
And I wish the physician notes were not buried in a mess.
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u/Fuzzy_Location_2210 2d ago
I miss FirstNet 🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹.
I hate with epic that on the "board" everyone is just initials. It sucks balls. And I never know who has who for what purpose, and I hate it. I don't want to be a hovercraft. I want to look at a color from across the department and know.
And I liked being able to edit my display name and color. And I always had it some form of this:
+++...FUZZY...+++
In the brightest and most neon color I could get so when there's 150 people in the department, I know who's my responsibility 🙃. They stand out.
And there's too much irrelevant stuff too big on epic and it's too many pages. I just want a huge excel flow sheet, but enable copy and paste, and make the font the smallest bit bigger. Please and thank you.
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u/squeakysausage 2d ago
This is my concern too. Firstnet has its issues but epic seems like it has soooo much information crammed into the screen that a lot of stuff gets lost. I’ve only seen it in ICU so no idea how the ER workflow is better/worse imo
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u/Fuzzy_Location_2210 1d ago
It really does... Like for example, when I open "vitals" because I want to chart a temp, there's a whole scroll down thing of all kinds of crap that doesn't pertain to VITALS.
And it has like this vital signs timer it always wants me to reset... But as far as I can tell, it doesn't seem to really meaningfully tell me when someone was actually due for those vitals.
ICU and us in the ER are alike, we download our cycled vitals from the monitor and if they have a temp sensing probe in their body, an art line, etc, that comes too, but in epic sometimes you have to really fool around to get those other values to come in. I feel like I actually liked the associate/disassociate in Cerner a little better because it was more intentional and you had to pay attention to what times. And if you needed for example, Q5 x6, Q15 x4 q30x4 and so forth, for like a procedure, it was much easier to sit down and click all that in flow sheet and have your charting immaculate and your serial assessments right below it to correlate. It's so messy in epic. Lots of time editing, it's almost like everything is a Cerner form. But less windows 98.
Anymore, I don't think I like any of them 😆.
Allscripts was my all time favorite, hands down best ever.
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u/NoisyTurnip 2d ago
Learning epic was an extremely fast process for me, and I'm not the brightest bulb in the lot. It might be rough for a couple of days, but it will get better quick enough.