When three hospital systems merged to form Corewell Health, leaders faced a choice: stitch together legacy databases or start fresh. They chose the latter, consolidating onto a single instance of Epic’s EHR and implementing a new centralized foodservice platform Illumia’s NetMenu. They used the unique opportunity of the Epic “reset” to establish a shared foundation that would allow them to operate as one organization.
Healthcare IT Today sat down with Anthony (Tony) Boggs, Senior Director of Support Services at Corewell Health. He shared how standardizing on NetMenu, timed with their move to a single Epic instance, created an opportunity to rethink and modernize adjacent systems like foodservice. This drove operational efficiencies, improved visibility, and enhanced patient safety across their 24 hospitals.
Key Takeaways
- Standardization drives efficiency. Moving to Illumia’s unified platform allowed Corewell Health to slash food SKUs by 70%, reducing waste and generating the ROI needed to fund the project.
- Epic integration supports patient safety and dietary accuracy. Connecting NetMenu directly to Epic automates dietary compliance, ensuring patients only receive meals that match their clinical requirements and allergy profiles.
- Hospital food service is a retail business. With 80% of meals going to staff and visitors, integrating point-of-sale data with back-end inventory is critical for financial performance.
Cutting SKUs to Reduce Waste and Fund Innovation
After the merger, Corewell Health wanted to operate as a single, unified organization. To do that, they needed a singular technology foundation. Unifying their foodservice operations on Illumia’s NetMenu allowed them to evaluate their purchasing at scale and eliminate redundancies.
The financial impact became clear over time. “When we look at SKUs or the number of products that we have, I mean, we’ve already reduced about 70% of our SKUs that we had when we started,” Boggs shared.
Dropping from a dozen different chicken tenders down to just two gave Corewell Health massive buying power. This consolidation reduced food waste, simplified operations, and delivered the hard ROI required to justify the technology investment to the C-suite.
Just as important, the system gave the Corewell team operational visibility they did not have before (ie: across purchasing, ordering patterns, and performance). That visibility allows them to make more informed decisions.
EHR Connectivity Automates Dietary Safety
The true power of the new foodservice platform was unlocked when it was connected to Corewell Health’s single instance of Epic EHR. Instead of relying on manual checks or duplicate data entry, the NetMenu system automatically cross-references a patient’s clinical requirements with available food options.
This creates an accurate, safe experience tailored to each patient’s clinical requirements. Boggs described the workflow: “We are getting our patient diet from Epic, and then our nutrition technology NetMenu actually says, is this chicken breast compliant to this diet that the clinical team has prescribed?” The system immediately flags allergens and nutritional content, preventing potential errors before a tray ever leaves the kitchen.
Retail Infrastructure for a Retail Operation
It is easy to assume hospital nutrition software focuses strictly on patient trays. The reality is quite different. Most meals served in a hospital are purchased by staff and visitors, meaning the underlying technology must function like a high-volume restaurant.
“What people don’t know is that a lot of healthcare systems actually serve a lot more retail meals than they do patient meals,” Boggs noted. “At Corewell, we’re at 80% retail and only 20% patient. It’s a whole lot more than just patient trays.”
To manage this, Corewell Health is implementing an Illumia point-of-sale system called Quick-Charge to integrate directly with NetMenu. This allows operations teams to accurately track sales data, monitor food costs, and manage inventory in real time based on actual consumption. That retail demand helps inform purchasing decisions, cost control, and inventory management.
The Bottom Line for Health IT Leaders
Technology consolidations following a merger are inherently difficult. Many opt to try to make old systems talk to one another – a productivity mirage. Corewell Health shows that building a completely new foundation pays dividends. By establishing a shared technology foundation and aligning/integrating systems early (Illumia’s NetMenu + Epic), they created a system that improves safety, reduces waste, and drives operational efficiency.
What Healthcare IT Leaders Are Asking
Why is a single EHR instance critical for auxiliary department software? Operating on a single EHR instance simplifies the integration architecture for all downstream systems. Instead of building and maintaining multiple interfaces to route patient data to a department like nutrition services, IT only has to manage one connection. This reduces technical debt and ensures data consistency across the organization.
How does point of sale data improve hospital food service operations? Point of sale systems provide real-time visibility into what items are selling in hospital cafeterias and retail spaces. This data allows operations teams to accurately track inventory, calculate exact food costs, and automate reordering processes. It prevents waste and helps the organization negotiate better pricing based on actual consumption metrics.
How does an EHR migration create an opportunity to modernize foodservice technology? When a health system commits to an EHR migration, they have a massive IT project ahead of them. Organizations that use the go-live as a forcing function to modernize both systems simultaneously find that building one clean integration is far less work than doing it twice. When both launch together, diet data flows correctly from day one, eliminating the patient safety risk of a temporary integration.
Learn more about Corewell Health at https://corewellhealth.org/
Learn more about Illumia at https://illumiatech.com/
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