Is Your Organization A Candidate For Refuel? (Free Download)
How to Assess Whether Your Epic Environment Is a Refuel Candidate
A Practical Framework for Health System Executives
For health systems running on Epic for 10 or more years, the environment starts to show its age. Workflows misalign with how care is delivered today. Customizations stack on top of older ones. Staff work around the system instead of in it. Leadership eventually arrives at a familiar crossroads: fix what you have or start over.
It looks like an IT question. It isn't. The answer shapes your organization's technology trajectory for the next decade, touches every clinical workflow, and carries a price tag that can reach nine figures. This guide covers how to recognize when Epic Refuel, a targeted optimization approach, is the right response, and what it takes to execute it well.
Why This Is a Strategy Decision, Not an IT Decision
Many health system executives walk into the rebuild-or-refuel decision without a clear framework for thinking it through. This guide focuses on one side of that decision: how to recognize when Refuel is the right path, and how to execute it in a way that actually holds.
7 Signs Your Epic Environment Is a Refuel Candidate
For many health systems, Refuel is a more viable path than the initial instinct to rebuild might suggest. Three of the seven signals are covered in the full guide:
Your Epic core is fundamentally sound but burdened by configuration debt. The foundation is salvageable. It needs a systematic unwinding, not a replacement.
Clinician frustration is rooted in workflow misalignment, not foundational failure. Complaints about clicks, Inbasket clutter, and mismatched templates are optimization problems, not reasons to rebuild.
You are paying for Epic capabilities you have never turned on. Ambient AI documentation, interoperability tools, and patient engagement features may already be sitting dormant in your environment.
CSI Tip
When clinician frustration centers on clicks, Inbasket clutter, or templates that don't match how care is delivered, that's a workflow problem. Those are the ones a Refuel is built to solve.
What's Inside the Full Refuel Guide
All 7 signs your organization is a Refuel candidate
When Refuel is not the right path, and what points toward a rebuild instead
What a serious Refuel engagement actually involves
Four questions to work through before you commit to either path
Why optimization efforts fail, and how to avoid the same outcome