Where: Leaders from the West Health Accelerator at Mass General Brigham took the spotlight at the 2026 Epic Users Group Meeting (UGM) conference in August 2026 to share lessons learned from a recent Epic build they launched in late 2025.
Who: Speakers included Zara Cooper, MD, MSc, FACS, co-director of the Accelerator; Lynne O'Mara, MBA, MPAS, e-care clinical director of the Accelerator; and Raj Patel, MD, MPH, MA, vice president of digital patient experience.
What: In late 2025, the West Health Accelerator team successfully hardwired evidence-based best practices for hospitalized adults ages 65 and older into Mass General Brigham’s Epic system. They spoke at the Epic UGM conference to share some important lessons they learned along the way with other health system leaders.
Key takeaways:
1. It’s not just about the technology.
The hardest part of the Epic build wasn't the technology. It was figuring out how to get the larger Mass General Brigham system to agree on what should be built, who needed to be involved, and how to make the change work for patients and the people using it.
During the 11-month process only three months involved the actual Epic build, while eight months went into design, specifications, governance, and change management.
The key to ensuring change management worked was taking a layered approach to stakeholder engagement — starting with the core team, then bringing in subject-matter experts, senior executives, and leaders and clinicians at individual hospitals.
2. Make the case for change in a way that resonates with people.
Data helped demonstrate the need for change, but the Accelerator team had to make the issue meaningful to leaders and connect it to patient care.
Storytelling was essential in elevating the work. Leaders had many competing priorities, so the team had to connect the technical changes to what they meant for actual patients.
3. Design with and for the stakeholders.
The goal was not to create more work, but to reduce cognitive burden by hardwiring evidence-based practices.
The team didn't impose a standardized systemwide solution. They took the proposed design back to service-line leaders and frontline clinicians to see if it would work in real time. They asked the question, “Does this work for you?”
4. Think strategically about scale.
Systemwide change doesn't necessarily mean tackling everything at once. It means identifying where focused interventions can have a broad impact.
The team used data to identify the highest-impact, manageable targets. For example, with more than 2 million medication administrations, they ultimately focused on 39 medications that reached about 71% of medication administrations across the system.
5. Don't stop at go-live.
Implementation isn't the finish line — successful implementation is an iterative process.
The team is combining quantitative measures with qualitative information about how clinicians and staff interact with the changes and using ethnographic observation, interviews, and quality metrics to understand what's working and where adjustments may still be needed.
What’s next: Mass General Brigham designed, built and tested this work so other health systems don’t have to start from scratch. Health systems can take these lessons and apply them in their own organizations without having to design the build themselves. Mass General Brigham will soon make the build specifications, templates and the steps took they took available to everyone, making implementation easier and faster. These resources will be included in a national adoption playbook, available to the public by the end of November 2026.