Epic Cheers is Epic’s customer relationship management application for healthcare. Health systems can use it to coordinate outreach and support contact-center conversations. It can also connect people with care and measure outcomes after an interaction.
Cheers works within the broader Epic ecosystem, but it is only one part of a healthcare CRM program. The organization still needs clear goals, sound data practices, content governance, operational capacity, and privacy and security review. People must also be ready to respond when patients engage.
What Does Epic Cheers Do?
Epic’s current Cheers overview describes personalized outreach, care-gap campaigns, prospective-patient engagement, contact-center workflows, provider search, routing, and measurement.
Depending on configuration, Cheers may help organizations:
- Create patient and consumer outreach campaigns
- Identify approved audiences
- Personalize communication
- Connect outreach with MyChart and scheduling
- Support care-gap and preventive-health campaigns
- Capture interest from prospective patients
- Help contact-center staff understand prior interactions
- Find providers and locations
- Route and track consumer requests
- Prioritize outreach based on approved criteria
- Monitor message engagement
- Measure appointments and other outcomes linked to campaigns
Organizations should confirm exact features, channels, and integrations in their licensed environment.
Healthcare CRM vs. General CRM
A general CRM helps an organization manage relationships, interactions, leads, campaigns, and service. A healthcare CRM must also account for identity, clinical context, privacy, communication preferences, access, and sensitive healthcare information.
Healthcare CRM workflows can involve:
- Existing patients
- Prospective patients or consumers
- Care gaps
- Service-line growth
- Provider and location information
- Contact centers
- Scheduling
- Patient communication
- Referral or request follow-up
- Campaign performance
Data and rules that make sense for one audience may be wrong for another. Governance should clearly separate clinical outreach, operational communication, service, marketing, and prospect engagement.
Care-Gap and Preventive Outreach
Cheers can support outreach to patients who may be due for approved preventive or chronic-care activities. A campaign might encourage eligible patients to schedule a screening, vaccination, follow-up, or other service.
Before launching a campaign, define:
- The eligible population
- The data and measure logic
- Exceptions and exclusions
- Clinical and operational ownership
- Communication channels
- Message review and approval
- Scheduling or next-step capacity
- Escalation for patient questions
- Opt-out and preference handling
- Success measures
Every outreach message should lead to a clear next step. A campaign will frustrate patients if appointments are unavailable or no one can answer their questions.
Engaging Prospective Patients
Epic describes Cheers workflows that can capture interest from people seeking services and follow up with relevant information. Prospective-patient engagement may connect website forms, service lines, provider information, locations, scheduling, and contact-center workflows.
Organizations should distinguish prospective-consumer data from established patient information and apply the appropriate consent, privacy, identity, retention, and communication rules.
Cheers gives contact-center staff context from prior interactions. It also helps move requests to the right person or department. Users may locate providers, record interactions, route work, track follow-up, and monitor service levels.
Effective contact-center implementation requires:
- Consistent request categories
- Clear routing and ownership
- Escalation paths
- Response-time expectations
- Provider and location data
- Scheduling integration
- Role-based access
- Quality monitoring
- Training and knowledge management
A CRM cannot fix unclear ownership. Simplify routing and accountability before trying to automate either one.
Personalization and Communication Channels
Personalization can make a message more relevant, but it needs guardrails. Decide which information may be used, which channels are approved, how preferences will be honored, and who reviews the content.
Channels may include MyChart, text messaging, email, voice, forms, scheduling, and contact-center follow-up. Available options depend on the organization’s Epic products and configuration.
Every message should state its purpose and use an appropriate sender identity. It also needs a practical next step. Follow organizational privacy, security, accessibility, and communication standards.
Campaign and Engagement Measurement
Epic describes tracking engagement steps such as opens and clicks. Organizations can also measure outcomes, including appointments scheduled or completed after a campaign.
Useful measures may include:
- Eligible audience size
- Successful delivery
- Open or click activity where available
- Response rate
- Form completion
- Contact-center follow-up
- Appointments requested
- Appointments scheduled
- Appointments completed
- Care gaps closed
- Time from response to service
- Opt-outs or complaints
- Staff effort
- Cost per completed outcome
Opens and clicks tell only part of the story. Judge a campaign by the healthcare or operational outcome it was meant to produce, along with any unintended effects.
Epic Cheers Implementation Considerations
Strategy and Use Cases
Prioritize a small number of clearly defined workflows. Establish the audience, desired action, owner, capacity, measure, and risk before building the campaign.
Data and Identity
Confirm where audience, contact, preference, provider, location, service, and scheduling data originates. Address duplicates, stale information, identity matching, and source ownership.
Privacy, Consent, and Security
Review permitted data use, communication preferences, role-based access, channel security, vendor dependencies, retention, and monitoring with the appropriate organizational stakeholders.
Content Governance
Define who writes, reviews, approves, updates, and retires messages, forms, campaigns, and knowledge content. Include clinical review when communication contains clinical guidance.
Operational Capacity
Make sure appointments, contact-center staff, service lines, and escalation teams can respond to the demand a campaign may create.
Integration and Testing
Test forms, audience selection, communication, links, MyChart, provider information, scheduling, routing, opt-outs, reporting, exceptions, and recovery.
Training and Adoption
Train campaign managers, contact-center staff, schedulers, analysts, service-line teams, and support resources on the full workflow and their responsibilities.
Epic Cheers Optimization
After launch, review:
- Audience accuracy
- Undeliverable communication
- Response and completion rates
- Appointment availability
- Routing delays
- Duplicate or conflicting outreach
- Patient and staff feedback
- Content performance
- Opt-outs and complaints
- Outcome measurement
- Workflow ownership
Use results to improve targeting, content, timing, routing, capacity, and the next-step experience.
Epic Cheers Jobs and Skills
Common roles may include:
- Epic Cheers analyst
- CRM or consumer-engagement strategist
- Contact-center workflow analyst
- Campaign manager
- Patient-access or scheduling specialist
- Data and reporting analyst
- Integration analyst
- Content and communications specialist
- Privacy or governance specialist
- Project manager
- Trainer or adoption lead
- Application support analyst
Useful skills include healthcare CRM, Epic workflows, patient access, contact centers, campaign operations, data governance, analytics, privacy, and content strategy. Testing, change management, and relevant Epic certification also matter.
Frequently Asked Questions About Epic Cheers
Is Epic Cheers a healthcare CRM?
Yes. Epic describes Cheers as its CRM application for healthcare.
Can Cheers support care-gap outreach?
Cheers can support approved campaigns that connect eligible patients with preventive or follow-up care. Exact capabilities depend on the organization’s configuration and workflows.
Does Cheers work with MyChart?
Cheers can connect with MyChart and other Epic patient-engagement workflows, depending on licensed products and configuration.
Can Cheers support contact centers?
Epic describes contact-center capabilities for understanding interactions, locating providers, routing requests, and tracking follow-up.
What should a health system do before implementing Cheers?
Define use cases, audience rules, data sources, ownership, capacity, communication governance, privacy, security, integrations, measures, training, and support.
How should a Cheers campaign be measured?
Measure both engagement and the intended outcome. Depending on the campaign, that can include response, appointments, completed services, care gaps closed, staff effort, opt-outs, and patient feedback.
Learn more about Epic consulting services or contact Healthcare IT Leaders.
Doug Herr is Healthcare IT Leaders’ Executive Director, Epic Practice. He draws on his 24+ years of provider and consulting experience in Operations, Information Technology, and Electronic Health Records systems.