Epic has broader ambitions to expand its capabilities beyond electronic health records and address workforce management, supply chain and financial operations.
The company is working to build a natively integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite specifically for healthcare operations that collects financial, operational, and clinical data into one integrated system. According to Aparna Sridhar, vice president of EpicOps at Epic, ERP integrates with Epic’s EHR, providing real-time visibility into schedules and resource usage across the organization.
The first application to be deployed from EpicOps is Teamwork, a clinician and staff scheduling and resource planning module with real-time pattern-driven, assignment-aware scheduling capabilities.
Staff scheduling is a complex puzzle for health systems, often involving disconnected manual processes.
Teamwork is not a standalone scheduling tool because it is part of the same system that performs patient care, Sridhar noted. Teamwork updates on-call assignments in real-time, so if there are critical results or a patient needs an adjustment, staff can immediately reach the appropriate clinician via secure chat.
Teamwork also integrates with Epic’s Cadence Schedule, so when a provider selects a new clinic shift, the system automatically opens an appointment slot on their schedule. Sridhar said FastPass automatically gives those slots to patients who are waiting for an advance appointment.
Epic’s scheduling and resource management applications reduce administrative effort and operational costs, speed up care coordination, and provide better patient care, Sridhar claims.
According to Epic, five healthcare organizations are currently implementing Teamwork, which was released in November 2024, and 11 more are actively implementing it.
“Previously, there was a significant lag between when a change in provider availability was made and when that change was reflected in the on-call schedule,” said James Bloom, M.D., chief medical information officer at University of Iowa HealthCare, a health system that implemented the teamwork application. “With Teamwork, schedules integrate well with existing systems and update in real time, allowing nurses, care coordinators, and other staff to reach available physicians faster.”
For nursing, Sridhar said teamwork can assess the number of patients expected over the next two weeks and how complex their care needs will be, informing when more staff will be needed on the unit. She noted that all updates to scheduled shifts occur in real time, so patients can be reassigned to a new clinician if their original caregiver calls in sick.
Dubai Health was the first organization to implement teamwork in nursing and the first health system outside the United States to adopt EpicOps. Teamwork applications make organizational scheduling more streamlined and sophisticated, said Dr. Sattar Al-Shrida, Clinical Head of Trauma and Orthopedics at Dubai Health.
Sridhar said EpicOps’ new features are being rolled out in phases, with time and attendance functionality expected to be introduced in August. The authentication and costing module within the EpicOps ERP suite is expected to be rolled out in mid-2027. He said supply chain and finance functions will be rolled out at the end of next year, followed by human resources and payroll functions.
Epic plans to add supply chain management capabilities to EpicOps to help health systems predict supply needs based on upcoming surgical schedules, preventing delays in care and reducing waste.
“There will be three phases of release, and in the first phase, we will release everything that can almost be considered an add-on to ERP, such as scheduling, authentication functions, costing, and other functions that are typically performed outside of a traditional ERP system. Then, in future phases, we will move into the core of ERP,” Sridhar said.
Epic plans to bring much of the health system’s operational backbone into the Epic ecosystem using its integrated ERP platform, which also aligns strategically with the company’s AI roadmap.
A few years ago, Sridhar said, healthcare customers requested a staff scheduling module that would integrate with Cadence, Epic’s scheduling tool used to schedule and track patient appointments, and also help manage capacity and reduce administrative burden.
“Our vision for ERP is fundamentally to help customers deal with workflow shortages, supply shortages, low operating margins, and need to operate as efficiently as possible in this environment,” Sridhar said.
Parkview Health, a 15-hospital health system serving Indiana and northwest Ohio, has implemented a teamwork module and is realizing the benefits of consolidating staff schedules within one platform, Dr. Mark Mabus, Parkview’s chief medical information officer, told Fierce Healthcare.
“What we definitely saw was very disparate scheduling methods across the system, the multiple third parties that we used, the Excel spreadsheets, even just plain old paper,” Mabus said. “Everyone using Epic can now schedule in Epic on Teamwork. So from a clinical and end-user perspective, keeping users in one system as a source of truth not only for day-to-day tasks but also for scheduling increases efficiency, reduces friction, and greatly improves the user experience with the software, leading to less burnout and frustration.”
Mabus added, “Ultimately, this will reduce costs because we can integrate exclusively into Epic products.”
Parkview Health also reports significant administrative time savings. “Thanks to Teamwork’s templates, real-time coverage views, and direct integration with Epic, we are now creating schedules for providers in 75% less time,” said Mabus.
He added, “Obviously going from paper and Excel to a program where you can set rules and patterns for scheduling has made it easier and faster to get things done.”
Teamwork also has the potential to improve scheduling and coordination among non-clinical staff, Mabus said. “We have a shift marketplace where users can sign up and select their desired shifts and submit them to reviewers. It’s all done electronically, rather than email or other time-consuming processes. It’s very efficient for the person managing the schedule, but it’s also efficient for the user. It’s also really improved the experience because it’s so easy to visualize the schedule,” he said.
Rolling out the teamwork module across the health system will take six to nine months, and the first staffing group will take three to four months, Sridhar said.
“We typically work with a very small number of early adopters, and we learn from those experiences and do it in stages. We are now able to staff up to 50 provider groups in three to four months,” she said.
In addition to managing staff schedules, Teamwork shows how hospitals are using labs by day and provider, and reveals unused capacity that can be used to see patients faster. Health systems can see how their physical space is actually being used, so they can bring in new providers and utilize existing space to increase patient access, Sridhar said.
“The ability to reduce the capital expenditures of building or renting more space reduces costs and improves patient access because patients can be seen sooner,” she says.
“Some of our specialty clinics have enabled room tracking, allowing us to direct those rooms to the providers who need them most,” Mabus said. “These clinics are typically some of our busiest or largest clinics, and we want to make sure that patient throughput matches room availability.”
As Epic continues to develop its EpicOps platform, Mabus expects to see benefits in healthcare-specific ERP integrated with medical records systems.
“This integration helps with some of our AI capabilities. Being able to have one data source as a knowledge base and uncover insights across the system, not just within silos, is extremely helpful. We have gone through several vendor integration processes in the past, and we have “We’ve identified some vendors, and we’re definitely trying to integrate and form an ecosystem with these trusted vendors. Then we can make sure that the tools we use are as aligned as possible,” Mabus said.
Parkview Health is also working “at breakneck speed” to deploy Epic’s generative AI capabilities across its health system, he said.
As Epic builds its ERP platform, it competes with global ERP giants like Oracle, SAP, Workday, and Dedalus, but the medical IT company says its deep focus on healthcare is a key point of differentiation.
“Most ERPs on the market are probably 10% to 15% healthcare focused, but we are 100% healthcare focused,” Sridhar said. “For example, the way we approach supply chain is not only looking at past material usage and predicting future usage, but also natively integrating it with future surgical schedules. We can also look at, ‘How do we predict what the census will be?’ So, based on that, you can determine when you might run into stockouts. And how can you avoid that by delaying patient care or replenishing or reducing inventory? Having that kind of connection makes it a lot easier to collaborate on the supply chain side.”
Sridhar points out that EpicOps allows leaders to more easily compare costs and outcomes, allowing them to see not just how much a procedure costs, but also whether patients who undergo surgery are able to go home faster or are less likely to be readmitted. “This background will help health systems reduce costs while improving patient care,” she says.
