St. Luke’s took a major step toward a digitally connected future on January 9, 2016, when the Network launched 18 of Epic’s inpatient modules across six campuses, laying the foundation for a modern electronic health record (EHR) system.
Today, St. Luke’s uses 42 Epic modules system‑wide, strengthening care quality, enhancing value, and seamlessly connecting our clinicians with health systems across the nation, helping St. Luke’s to be ranked No. 1 in quality, safety and patient experience by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
This decade of growth has been powered by people. St. Luke’s has delivered more than 121,000 Epic training classes for more than 41,000 employees and providers, preparing every nurse, provider, scheduler and revenue cycle specialist to care for patients in a fully digital environment.
“This milestone reflects more than a decade of technology rollout—it represents our commitment to using digital innovation to support our clinicians and continuously improve care for our patients,” said Chad Brisendine, Chief Information Officer at St. Luke’s. “By investing early in Epic, cloud infrastructure, interoperability, and now artificial intelligence, we’ve built a foundation that helps our teams deliver safer, smarter, and more connected care every day.”
From the beginning, St. Luke’s invested in a resilient technology infrastructure. Epic was initially hosted across two on‑premise data centers to support critical workflows. A few years later, St. Luke’s became one of the first health networks in the country to migrate Epic to the Cloud, improving performance, strengthening security and advancing disaster recovery times from hours to just minutes.
Data sharing has grown dramatically as well. In 2016, St. Luke’s exchanged just over one million patient records with other health care organizations. Today, that number has surged to 13 million outgoing records each year, and more than 22 million incoming. St. Luke’s clinicians have also closed 3.3 million care gaps through Epic’s Care Everywhere interoperability network.
Patients have benefited from this digital transformation through the MyChart patient portal, which empowers them to manage their care anytime, anywhere. Nearly one million patients now use MyChart to schedule appointments, join virtual visits and access their medical information. Over the past decade, patients completed more than 5 million e‑check-ins, viewed 37.5 million test results, and submitted 1.5 million medication renewal requests.
Epic’s Hello World platform, launched at St. Luke’s last year, has further modernized communication through two‑way text messaging for appointments, billing, scheduling and more.
Epic’s advanced artificial intelligence is powering St. Luke’s next leap forward. By combining Epic’s Sepsis Model with real‑time Sepsis Time Zero alerts, St. Luke’s has reduced septic shock cases, lowered mortality and increased CMS sepsis bundle compliance from 82% to 92%.
Epic’s Deterioration Index has strengthened patient safety by reducing ICU transfers by 11%, increasing survival‑to‑discharge to 36%, and driving code events to top‑decile performance across the Network. These innovations earned St. Luke’s a HAP Achievement Award and contributed to three HIMSS Davies Award, an honor achieved by only a few organizations nationwide.
Clinicians have also benefited from Epic’s AI tools, which have decreased documentation time and reduced inbox burden. Over the past decade, Epic alerts have helped clinicians adjust care plans 1.2 million times, eliminated 19 million inBasket messages, and generated 1.3 million note summaries by analyzing 22 million clinical notes. Note entry time has dropped from about seven minutes to just over 15 seconds.
“St. Luke’s exemplifies how technology can help clinicians provide high-quality, patient-centered care,” said Rob Klootwyk, Director of Interoperability at Epic. “Through MyChart, St. Luke’s has made it simpler for patients to stay informed, engaged, and confident in their care. Through Care Everywhere, they’ve helped ensure that when patients travel across town or across the country, their medical history travels with them—reducing uncertainty and inefficiency and ultimately improving health outcomes.”
St. Luke’s remains one of the nation’s most digitally advanced health systems, consistently earning CHIME’s Most Wired Level 9 distinction.
About St. Luke’s
Founded in 1872, St. Luke’s University Health Network (SLUHN) is a fully integrated, regional, non-profit network with annual net revenue of more than $4.5 billion. With 23,000+ employees at 16 hospital campuses and 350+ outpatient sites, it is the Lehigh Valley’s biggest employer.
The Network’s service area includes 11 counties in two states: Lehigh, Northampton, Berks, Bucks, Carbon, Montgomery, Monroe, Schuylkill and Luzerne counties in Pennsylvania and Warren and Hunterdon counties in New Jersey. St. Luke’s Children’s Hospital is based at the Bethlehem Campus.
Dedicated to advancing medical education, St. Luke’s is the preeminent teaching hospital in central-eastern Pennsylvania. In partnership with Temple University, the Network established the Lehigh Valley’s first and only four-year medical school. It also operates the nation’s oldest continuously operated School of Nursing, established in 1884, and 60+ fully accredited graduate medical educational programs with 550+ residents and fellows.
In 2025, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services ranked St. Luke’s #1 – ahead of Houston Methodist and Mayo Clinic, two of the nation’s most prestigious institutions – as the nation’s top health system for quality, safety and patient experience. This objective recognition, based on public data reported to the government, reaffirms St. Luke’s preeminent position as THE BEST OF THE BEST among the most respected health care systems in the United States.
St. Luke’s has been named a Leapfrog Group and Healthgrades Top Hospital and a Newsweek World’s Best Hospital. It is the only Lehigh Valley-based health care system to earn Medicare’s five-star ratings (the highest) for quality, efficiency and patient satisfaction. In 2026, the Network earned straight A’s from Leapfrog across all of its acute care hospitals. It has earned 100 Top Hospital designations from Premier 12 years in a row, including in 2021 when its flagship University Hospital was identified as THE #1 TEACHING HOSPITAL IN THE COUNTRY. Utilizing the Epic electronic medical record (EMR) system for both inpatient and outpatient services, the Network is a multi-year recipient of the Most Wired award recognizing the breadth of SLUHN’s information technology applications such as telehealth, online scheduling and online pricing information.
Information provided to TVL by:
Sam Kennedy
