Epic's Beaker LIS

[CJ]

Hello,

Just looking for opinions particularly in Cytogenetics, but also other genetic labs from anyone who has used Epic's Beaker as it looks likely that we will be switching to it.

If anyone has seen it in comparison to Cerner Millenium's Helix or to Genial Genetics's Shire , that would also be really helpful.

Thanks you so much!

Camille

[M. MULLEN]

Beaker.....Whoa boy

Not great for cyto. We combine ours with shire and have a workable system . Its inefficient and inflexible. The only reason we keep shire is for collecting CAP required statistics which we havent been able to do on Epic because  it require too much customization and programmer time. 

[Pat Cammarata]

Hi,

Can you elaborate on what you do on Epic for your CAP required statistics?

Pat Cammarata

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[Pat Cammarata]

Hi Camille,

Our hospital switched to Epic as a whole last October and we are on Epic beaker. It has really been one problem after another. They recommended that we be set up as a clinical pathology test as opposed to an anatomic pathology test. What that means is that each item on our report is a separate component as opposed to more of a paragraph report. That part is working out pretty much OK. One of the problems we had was that Epic makes universal changes without taking our individual lab under consideration. For example: One of our components is Laboratory Number. We wanted to continue with our 6 digit consecutive numbering instead of using the 12 digit Epic number. But when they made a change after year one, our lab number came up as 170,485 and should have been 170485 (485th specimen in 2017). They were able to fix it going forward but if anyone looks up a report from early 2017, it reads as if the specimen was the 170,485th specimen of the year! And trust me, we are a tiny lab and this was NOT the case! The major problem I have with Epic in general is that there are separate customized individual modules for each department and the way that our test is ordered is different depending upon whether the specimen is coming from Labor and Delivery or the GOR or the Women's Surgical center or Radiology or Ultrasound or Pathology or Outpatients!!! As a result, we have actually missed receiving specimens and formalin was added before it was discovered that it was supposed to come to us! It took forever for Epic to design the way to document the collection of our specimens from all of these various areas! In some cases, the test was ordered and collected correctly but then auto cancelled by the system for some insane reason! These are irreplaceable specimens!! I just don't understand the fact that if Epic is such a big successful company that has done numerous other labs, why weren't all of these issues sorted out LONG before setting up Epic in my hosptial??

Most of our problems probably stem from the fact that we are a very low volume department and that our hospital jumped in too fast without adequately sorting out some of these issues. If you are just a genetics department and not part of a larger organization it may work for you. But from my perspective, it is not worth the astronomical price tag.

I apologize for not getting back to you sooner but the time taken for problem solving  have added tremendously to my workload. Good luck and let me know what you decide!

Pat Cammarata

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[M. MULLEN]

Sorry, i didnt word it very well.  We don t use epic for any of our cap required stats, not even TAT. Its just not flexible enough to segregate out different specimen types, band level,  etc. I can get cumulative band levels for everything we've karyotyped, but if you want to segregate BMs from the PBs, stats from the routines, thats when it gets hairy.   All of it can be done in theory, but it requires many man hours of customization, programming and rebuilding of procedures to get exactly what i need. We are a large health system and those resources are in high demand. Its been 5 years and we haven't been able to even get  a discussion about our problems   I would expect that if you know ahead of time what we didnt know then you could make it easier on yourself by insisting that separate specimen types be built as completely separate procedures, IE: BM chromosome analysis is not the same test as Tissue chromosome analysis . 

We kept our old LIS, Shire, so we could do stats, make forms. Terribly inefficient, double data entry for every patient , but it is what it is.  

On Saturday, January 13, 2018 at 10:00:57 PM UTC-6, Pat wrote:

Hi,

Can you elaborate on what you do on Epic for your CAP required statistics?

Pat Cammarata

On January 8, 2018 at 2:56 PM "M. MULLEN" <sfhge...@gmail.com> wrote:

Beaker.....Whoa boy

Not great for cyto. We combine ours with shire and have a workable system . Its inefficient and inflexible. The only reason we keep shire is for collecting CAP required statistics which we havent been able to do on Epic because  it require too much customization and programmer time. 

On Sunday, January 7, 2018 at 6:18:17 AM UTC-6, CJ wrote:

Hello,

Just looking for opinions particularly in Cytogenetics, but also other genetic labs from anyone who has used Epic's Beaker as it looks likely that we will be switching to it.

If anyone has seen it in comparison to Cerner Millenium's Helix or to Genial Genetics's Shire , that would also be really helpful.

Thanks you so much!

Camille

 

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[CJ]

Thanks so much for the replies, I will forward them up to our leadership team to take into consideration.

Our entire health system (multiple hospitals and labs across our entire province) is switching to Epic and we haven't yet been told definitively if our genetics labs (10 labs) will be switching over yet or not. Interestingly, we have been working on moving our genetic labs to Millenium Helix in the past few years and it has been difficult to get our workflows set up as Cytogenetics does not seem to fit in as well in their Helix module. I am wary that not having a Cytogenetic, or even Genetic, module in Beaker - may cause a host more problems than our current Shire system.

Thanks again!

Camille