The July 17 Epic Upgrade Launches a New Quarterly Upgrade Cadence at Cook Children’s

The July 17 upgrade is more than a single Epic update—it marks the beginning of a faster, more responsive upgrade rhythm for Cook Children’s. By moving to quarterly upgrades, we can bring meaningful improvements to end users sooner, support innovation more effectively, and continue optimizing Epic in ways that make daily work simpler and more efficient.

Thank you to all teams who support testing, training, communication, and readiness for each upgrade. Your partnership helps ensure Cook Children’s continues to make the most of Epic’s evolving capabilities while keeping patient care at the center of every improvement.

What Cook Children’s clinicians are saying:

For many clinicians, the move to quarterly upgrades is an opportunity to stay closer to the latest Epic functionality and reduce the waiting period for valuable workflow improvements. 

Kara Starnes, D.O.:

Dr. Starnes shared that she is encouraged by the new cadence because it allows Cook Children’s to remain at the forefront of Epic’s latest offerings and stay current on important fixes. She noted that when national Epic user groups discuss new ideas and enhancements, Cook Children’s has sometimes had to wait for the next upgrade before implementing them. Quarterly upgrades will help close that gap.

Bruce Beasley, PA:

Bruce has participated in Epic End-User Acceptance Testing for several years, noted that six months of changes can create a large upgrade package. Moving to quarterly upgrades allows for more subtle, steady improvements while creating a stronger foundation for testing and piloting new tools, including AI-enabled features, so they can reach clinicians more quickly.

Tammy Hayward, M.D.:

Dr. Hayward summed up the benefit simply: “I’m glad we won’t have to wait as long for updates that may streamline our workflow.”

What’s coming with the July upgrade:

The July 17 upgrade includes several improvements designed to help teams work more efficiently, see important information faster, and take advantage of new tools within Epic. For a full list of featured updates for your role, click What’s New in the top right or your Epic screen.

Inpatient Physicians

• AI Text Assistant for edits: Quickly enhance Notes, In Basket messages, and other text fields using generative AI. Users can summarize text, adjust tone for a specific audience, update formatting, and check spelling and grammar by highlighting text to activate the tool.
• Medication order timing improvements: New timing options will help physicians specify when changes to medication orders should take effect.

All Clinicians

• Clinicians will be able to hover over a Wound LDA to see saved photos of the wound, making visual information easier to access within the workflow.

Inpatient Nursing

• Nursing teams can assign unit responsibilities, such as checking the crash cart or completing glucometer quality control, directly from the Assignment Wizard.

Health Plan

• Expanded SlicerDicer reporting: New filters and sessions for AP Claims, AP Claim Actions, and AP Claim Service Lines will help teams investigate claim review throughput, claim volumes, and related information.
• Provider schedule visibility: Teams can peek at provider schedules from Book It Solutions to see a fuller picture during scheduling and review workflows.

Urgent Care Center

• A new SlicerDicer component will allow teams to investigate patient volumes by chief complaint and age.

Front Desk

• Similar patient names will now be highlighted, helping front desk teams identify potential name similarities more quickly during patient-facing workflows.

OR and Anesthesia

• AI-generated preprocedure summaries in Procedure at a Glance will now include external notes, such as cardiology consults and discharge summaries from outside the organization. This gives teams a more complete view of relevant information before surgery.

Ambulatory

• Preventive care tasks in one place: Teams can save time by making multiple updates to Health Maintenance topics, postponing and adding topics from Storyboard, and releasing or scheduling orders without leaving Health Maintenance.
• Faster access to directly addressed In Basket messages: The new Only My Messages option in Search helps users quickly find messages sent specifically to them rather than to a pool. It can also help users find messages sent directly to colleagues they are covering for.