Refueling the Foundation

Your Epic environment may have been cutting-edge when it was built.

But years of workarounds, customizations, bolt-on applications, and deferred cleanup can quietly turn technical debt into a strategic constraint—limiting your organization's ability to leverage Epic's capabilities and advance its value-based care goals. At some point, the question is no longer how to optimize around the debt, but whether the foundation itself needs to be rebuilt.

Cone Health faced that inflection point after 14 years on the same Epic foundation. Rather than continue layering solutions onto an increasingly complex environment, the health system committed to a $40 million effort to rebuild its Epic foundation and create a more sustainable platform for the future—one built to support innovation rather than constrain it.

In this webinar, Dr. J. Michael Kramer, Chief Medical Information Officer at Cone Health, joins Optimum Healthcare IT to share the thinking behind that decision and the leadership lessons emerging from the journey. Dr. Kramer will walk through Cone Health's phased approach, beginning with a six-month Phase Zero designed to assess readiness and build the business case, and moving into a comprehensive Epic Refuel assessment and multi-year optimization roadmap.

The conversation will explore how Cone is connecting Epic modernization to its broader value-based care strategy, shifting governance toward clinical and operational ownership, evaluating opportunities to adopt Epic best practices and rationalize third-party applications, and building the organizational alignment required for sustained change across clinical, operational, and IT stakeholders.

Attendees will also hear candid reflections on securing executive buy-in for a multi-year investment of this scale, managing change fatigue among clinicians and staff, and measuring progress in ways that keep leadership engaged long after the initial rollout excitement fades.

For healthcare leaders wondering whether their own Epic environment has reached the point where optimization is no longer enough, Cone Health offers a candid look at what it means to rebuild the foundation—not simply patch the symptoms—and create an operating model for continuous optimization.