Pick your cliche to describe a major event this past week: Another domino is falling. The dawn of a new era. The news that Vanderbilt University Medical Center, home to one of the most esteemed academic informatics programs in the country, is replacing its collection of home-grown and commercial electronic health record (EHR) systems with Epic shows that the era of the home-grown academic EHR is coming to a close.
Whatever cliche we wish to use, the change is real for academic informatics. One by one, many of the major academic informatics programs have sunset their home-grown EHRs in favor of commercial systems, including Partners Healthcare, Mayo Clinic, Intermountain Healthcare, and the Veteran’s Administration.
