Small Illinois facility rolls out Epic and pursues AI benefits
After the year-long implementation effort, CGH Medical Center envisions efficiency gains, better patient care and improved recruitment.
Quick, what types of healthcare organizations are currently employing artificial intelligence?
The answers that may pop into your mind immediately are large integrated delivery systems or venerable academic medical centers with massive implementation budgets and esoteric research-heavy intentions.
Perhaps the last answer you’d expect would be 99-bed CGH Medical Center in Sterling, Ill. Located in the Sauk Valley area of northern Illinois, the community hospital serves an area with 105,000 people. The organization also operates more than a dozen outlying clinics in small towns such as Dixon, Mount Carroll and Walnut.
Earlier this month, the municipally owned organization turned on its own Epic healthcare information system, becoming one of the smallest healthcare organizations to implement Epic across its hospital and clinic settings, pursuing the goal of achieving seamless care‑team collaboration through a unified record.
The CGH implementation – after an intensive year of planning and training – shows that Epic records systems may now be in play for smaller healthcare organizations, which also may be able to effectively use AI use cases to achieve significant efficiencies.
History of the project
For years, CGH had operated on two different records systems, using Cerner for inpatient care and NextGen in outpatient settings, says Ben Schaab, its chief financial officer.
After initial discussions with Epic, CGH began discussions with the vendor in earnest in 2023. “We wanted a unified record,” Schaab says. “That was big from a digitalization standard. We knew we were behind the curve, and we wanted something that is provider friendly. That’s important because recruiting physicians at rural hospitals is difficult, and Epic can help us be more competitive.”
Additionally, the implementation includes the integration of AI‑powered tools within that platform — ambient listening to draft notes, automated suggestions for documentation and follow‑ups, and more. Those capabilities are powered by Epic's "AI Starter Kit."
The advanced computing capabilities will help immediately reduce administrative burden, freeing clinicians to focus on patients, and enhance care coordination when specialists, or even nearby hospital referrals, may be limited.
As part of the Epic transition, CGH is offering MyChart to patients, combining and replacing the two separate hospital and clinic MyAccess accounts. That ramps up patient options, enabling them to have direct all-hours access to their health information and care team, among other capabilities.
“MyChart is a game-changer for our patients,” says Marcia Jones, MD, chairman of CGH’s board of directors and a family medicine physician. “It gives our community direct access to their health information and their care team – something that’s become a hallmark of major health systems and is now available right here at home.”
The implementation project
The beginning of the implementation kicked off in October 2024, says Jolie Parks-Gruhn, its director of informatics and Epic implementation.
“One challenge is we did have to have a large team to implement Epic, and our legacy system teams were pretty thin,” she says. “So we had to hire some – some were new to the healthcare technology world, and we got some from other facilities. That took a long time to recruit the right folks for the jobs.”
The implementation received input from a wide range of CGH staff and professionals, which also took commitment. “People here wear a lot of hats – a lot goes into their jobs. We needed expertise from clinicians and revenue cycle professionals to drive the implementation. It did require time, and everyone put in a little extra effort.”
In all, some 1,500 CGH clinicians and other professionals have been trained on the system. Some clinicians were a bit reluctant to make the transition, but they’ve easily adapted to the new AI capabilities.
For many, “it was a no-brainer,” Schaab says. Technology like ambient speech to records “means more time with patients, less time tracking things in the system. For the most part, once they hear what it can do, they say, ‘I want to do that today.’ Once they start to use it, I don’t think we’ll ever take it back. It frees up time so they can see patients and think about patient care instead of pounding on a keyboard.”
Some advice for smaller organizations
Moving to a new system with AI capabilities can come with challenges, but Schaab says smaller organizations “shouldn’t be afraid of the lift. We’re not a critical access hospital, but we’re not huge; it’s worth the effort.”
There’s an experiential, educational component with AI, Parks-Gruhn contends. “Sometimes people are a little scared of the technology. The way we’re using AI with Epic is not taking away from the human experience, but enhancing it and allowing us to focus more on human interactions.”
“From a scalability perspective, it’s hard to look at the dollars, but instead look at the bigger picture of what you want to achieve as an organization,” Schaab concludes. “Consider provider and employee satisfaction scores. We’re looking to minimize turnover. We take pride in being the largest employer in the region.”
CGH’s President and CEO Paul Steinke, MD, notes that “There’s a misconception that advanced healthcare technology is only for large, urban hospitals. We’re proving that innovation can thrive in rural communities – and that our patients deserve access to the same modern tools as anyone in the country.”
Fred Bazzoli is the Editor in Chief of Health Data Management