Inside Blessing Health's Move From 300 Systems To One EMR

By John Oncea, Chief Editor, Clinical Tech Leader

When Kiley McGlauchlen joined Blessing Health System in November 2020, there was no clinical research department to speak of. Not a small one, not an informal one. “Nothing,” she said when asked what existed before her arrival. “Nope.”

Five years later, McGlauchlen, now Director of Clinical Research at the Quincy, IL-based health system, has overseen two technology transformations: standing up a research program inside an existing hospital IT environment from a cold start, and then, this year, helping lead Blessing’s migration off a fragmented legacy electronic medical record onto Epic. Together, the two moves offer a rare before-and-after view of what it actually takes to build clinical research technology inside a community health system: first without any infrastructure at all, and later with too much of it.

A Department Built To Prove A Business Case

Blessing’s research department exists because of a conversation that started with physician burnout, not clinical trials. In 2020, hospital leadership was looking for ways to keep physicians engaged and advancing medicine locally. McGlauchlen, then working with a separate physician group, had built a relationship with Blessing’s leadership through a research committee. When those burnout conversations turned toward innovation, then-CEO Maureen Kahn, who knew McGlauchlen through that committee, reached out directly.

She came to that first meeting with Kahn and Chief Financial Officer Pat Gerveler with three conditions, not a resume of feature requests: physicians who actually wanted to do research, executive-level buy-in across pharmacy, lab, pathology, and radiology so the department could function across departmental lines, and a job offer. “You can lead a horse to water,” she said, “but you can’t make it drink.” Leadership agreed to all three, and McGlauchlen started that November.

The first technology task wasn’t choosing software; it was getting a Clinical Research Department to exist inside the hospital’s electronic medical record at all, as its own service line, so visits could be scheduled, documentation captured, and investigational drug orders routed through pharmacy with a physician’s signature attached. Medical oncology became the first clinical focus, driven partly by an external requirement: Blessing’s Commission on Cancer accreditation as a comprehensive community hospital program requires clinical trial recruitment, which meant the research department had to prove itself there first.

Notably, McGlauchlen had no real choice of EMR platform at the time. Blessing’s physicians already had established patient populations and workflows inside an existing system, and research was built as an extension of that, not a standalone build. “There was really no decision-making opportunity,” she said.

Three Hundred Systems, And A Decision To Consolidate

That changed in 2025, when Blessing’s board approved a move to Epic, the electronic medical record used broadly across major U.S. health systems. McGlauchlen described the decision as a combination of two pressures: the legacy platform had moved into what she called a “grandfathered” status, with updates arriving less frequently than the organization needed, and the system had accumulated years of workaround fixes. “We have 300 standalone, separate systems across the organization that manage different things,” she said, describing how individual departments had bought point solutions over the years because the core EMR didn’t do what they needed.

Epic’s broader functionality let Blessing begin folding some of those standalone systems back in. Ophthalmology, dermatology, and radiation oncology, McGlauchlen said, previously ran on separate systems because the old EMR had no module for them; Epic’s built-in modules for those specialties let the organization retire the standalone tools. She expects that consolidation to continue as Epic adds functionality over time.

The build itself took more than a year. McGlauchlen became personally certified in Epic research billing and research clinical administration, traveling to Epic’s headquarters in Verona, WI for training. “I serve as the IS analyst now,” she said, “which is kind of crazy, because I didn’t go to school for any of that.”

Change Management, In Three Layers

Blessing went live on the new system on March 21, 2026, following what McGlauchlen described as a deliberately layered rollout plan. “We always have a Plan A, a Plan B, and a Plan C,” she said. Plan A is the intended rollout; when that gets bumpy, the team pivots to Plan B, and if that doesn’t hold, to Plan C, with each contingency communicated to staff in advance rather than improvised in the moment. During go-live week, the team supplemented formal training sessions with short, two- to three-minute just-in-time videos addressing specific tasks as staff encountered them.

Even with a smooth technical rollout, McGlauchlen is cautious about declaring early success. Five months in, she says there isn’t yet enough data to evaluate the system’s real strength: analytics. She’s looking ahead to a point – 12 to 24 months of accumulated data – where the system can answer questions like which patients admitted with a specific condition and treatment history have an upcoming appointment and might qualify for an open trial, then trigger a targeted outreach message through the patient portal.

The migration also hasn’t eliminated paper, and McGlauchlen doesn’t expect it to. Clinical trial source documentation is often protocol-specific in ways a general-purpose EMR can’t anticipate, and she cited one study requiring three blood pressure readings, five minutes apart, with the first reading discarded and the remaining two averaged and time-stamped. Building a custom EMR form for every protocol variation like that isn’t realistic, she said, which is part of why she’s become an advocate for standardizing what data trials ask sites to collect in the first place.

For other community health systems considering the same path, McGlauchlen’s advice starts with relationships, not procurement. “Work with the willing,” she said. “You’ll get so much more done if you find who’s already pro-research within a department and build that relationship. Physician buy-in and executive leadership; that’s the foundation everything else sits on.”