Epic, the Wisconsin-based company which develops software for sharing medical records, was instrumental in creating displays of patient information in this trauma room at the Mayo Clinic. Heather Heaton to customize a system that allowed critical patient information to be displayed on those screens all at once. Epic's Mallory Heinzeroth worked with Dr. The Mayo Clinic's trauma rooms now have more screens than a Best Buy. Without good access to data, you really are flying blind.'

'But the ability to have it all coming from one source makes it a lot easier. 'We've been keeping track of the diagnoses of the Mayo Clinic patients since before we had electronic records,' Dr. It was state-of-the-art in record-keeping at the time, so it makes sense that the Mayo Clinic would end up today being the single-biggest client of Epic, spending over a billion dollars over the next several years to integrate its systems.Ĭowan asked, 'How much is this going to change things?' It was like arteries inside of the building.' 'There must've been miles and miles of tubing?' asked Cowan. It's the old days I don't want to rush back to!' Dr. 'In this case the patient's getting blood drawn, they're going to a surgery visit, they're going to pain clinic, they're going to mammography. Records from Mayo Clinic patients used to fly around from room to room in pneumatic tubes. Steve Peters, a pulmonary critical care physician at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, showed Cowan copies of what the old detailed paper records used to look like, and how they used to travel. Paper records served us well for centuries, but boy, what a rat's nest of data.ĭr. 'All of this data was never available in the past, and now you can see it all on your phone,' he said. In fact, you can now check lab results, re-fill medications, make appointments, even share your medical records right from an Epic app, said engineer Sean Bina. Its ubiquity means that now you can go almost anywhere to be treated, and your medical records will likely follow you. In the decades that followed it grew from the mundane to a system that is now integral to patient care in nearly every major U.S. The first time I did something, there it was on the screen, and I was like, Wow. 'And I always thought of computer programming as clay of the mind. 'I used to like, when I was a kid, to play with clay, and makes things out of clay,' she said. No one had spent much time figuring out how to get a computer to handle all that data, but Faulkner always had a way with computers, and engineered a program herself. The goal: to move patient records from over-stuffed, dog-eared manila folders to digital records accessible with the click of a mouse. It was 1979 when the company started, in a basement with just two employees. It's making other people be able to be healthy and happy.' I don't feel like I'm just clocking and clocking out.'īostrom said, 'We're not here to just grind out on something that's not really doing anything. 'I feel like we have an impact to make,' Horner said, 'and it's something that I actually really value about here.

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