It’s a year now since UConn Health went live with its new electronic health record system and patient portal known as myUConnHealth.

Following more than two years of preparation for the transition away from paper charts, the modern, integrated platform informally known as Epic, the name of the software vendor, went online at 5:17 a.m. April 28, 2018.

“What we have seen in the last year is more than the implementation of a new electronic health record,” says Dr. Andy Agwunobi, UConn Health CEO and executive vice president for health affairs. “This really is a transformation in patient care, one that we’ll continue to build on in year two and beyond.”

“It truly is a journey, and this is just the first part of it,” says UConn Health Chief Information Officer Bruce Metz. “It’s a much more complex and comprehensive system than we’ve had, with a more consistent process across health systems and better connection to patients, and that results in better patient care.”

Now that all UConn Health’s inpatient and outpatient practices are using the same integrated system, patient information can flow securely among the patient’s providers, and coordination of care with outside providers is more consistent. All members of the care team have access to the most current patient information, greatly enhancing the continuity of care both within and beyond the UConn Health system, and enabling providers to take steps to manage care before and after the visit.

“It’s been really positive,” says Dr. Eric Mortensen, chief of general internal medicine. “Prior, it wasn’t always immediately clear to the primary care physician what the specialties were doing. This has greatly improved communication between stakeholders.”

That includes the patient, who can take a more active role in his or her own health care with the myUConnHealth portal. It provides patients with secure, real-time access to their medical chart, including notes from their visits and lab and test results. They also can send messages to their providers, request prescription renewals, manage appointments, and keep their own information updated in between visits.

And while patients benefit individually, the integrated health record generates aggregate data that can lead to promising advances in epidemiology.

“We’re using data in a smarter way, which opens up a lot of opportunities for us not only to treat disease but also to prevent it,” says Dr. Dirk Stanley, UConn Health’s chief medical information officer. “The promise of all of this is we’ll be able to use data to protect the health of our community to a degree that our forefathers could not have imagined.”

Adds Mortensen, “We’re only beginning to tap our research potential.”