A new $764 million medical records system is launching at the municipal hospital system on April 2 — even though insiders warn it isn’t ready and patients will suffer.
The soft launch of the electronic system Epic is scheduled at Elmhurst and Queens hospitals.
“Sooner or later, it will crash,” said one source involved in the project. “There will be patient harm — patient harm and patient death.”
Sources say Dr. Ramanathan Raju, who runs the municipal network, NYC Health + Hospitals, is under the gun from City Hall to meet the deadline and fears he’ll be fired if he doesn’t.
“Raju has said too many times to count that the Mayor’s Office has told him if April 1st doesn’t happen, then Ram will lose his job,” one source said.
The source added that Raju has threatened to fire top executives if the project doesn’t launch on time.
The hospital system is already on City Hall’s watch list, having required a $337 million bailout in January to stay afloat.
Insiders contend that the only safe way to roll out Epic is to take more time — about three months — to address several key issues.
One is planning for a crash, which some consider almost inevitable because the new setup hasn’t been configured to work with systems at other hospitals or with some of its own internal billing and tracking software.
Existing patient data also has to be transferred from the old system — a process that would normally take six months, but which was shoehorned into less than one.
Failing to do it right could mean medical records are lost.
“There are supposed to be all these dry runs,” a source said. “They haven’t been done.”
City officials contend Epic remains “on-time and within budget.”
A mayoral spokeswoman said there would be a round-the-clock effort to ensure there are no glitches.
“NYC Health + Hospitals and its Epic implementation experts are prepared to implement the new system in Queens facilities beginning April 2, and have assembled a team of about 900 technicians and Epic experts who will work around-the-clock that week both in Queens and at remote data centers to ensure the transition to the new system goes as smoothly as possible,” said spokeswoman Ishanee Parikh.
Source: nypost.com