MaineHealth increasing spending on software system that was involved with billing glitches

MaineHealth will spend an extra $55 million, mostly for training staff, on a system that has led to costly errors.

The parent company of Maine Medical Center has increased its investment in a sweeping new computer system that was designed to make it easier for patients and medical professionals to access health records but caused the company problems in its first year. MaineHealth officials said most of the increase, from $145 million to $200 million, will be used to expand employees’ training, to fix problems related to learning the Epic software that led to millions of dollars in billing losses.

With the new system, Maine Medical Center failed to send out accurate bills, which became a major factor in the hospital’s loss of $13.4 million in the first six months of its 2013 fiscal year, officials have said. Bill Caron, president of MaineHealth, said Epic had a rough start when it was installed at the state’s largest hospital in late 2012...He said MaineHealth originally underestimated the resources needed to train employees to use Epic, and it might have been a mistake to start the new computer system with the 6,000-employee Maine Medical Center, MaineHealth’s largest employer...

...Afton Trotter, an emergency room nurse, said that while Epic isn’t a problem by itself, the way it’s being used is making it more difficult at times for nurses to interact with patients, because the nurses have to spend so much time with computers. “I’m not sure that the implementation of Epic at Maine Medical Center has had the same benefit to safe and patient focused care as it has had on increasing the ease of billing and increasing productivity,” Trotter said in a written statement. “In my practice safe medication administration is a lot more than bar code scanning and still requires a competent professional to think critically about the ‘rights’ of safe medication administration.”...