How Corewell Health Integrated Epic and Illumia to Cut Waste and Improve Patient Safety

Why It Matters

This demonstrates how tightly integrating clinical EHRs with standardized foodservice technology can drive measurable cost savings, safer personalized care, and operational scale after mergers. For health systems, it’s a replicable model to improve patient experience while reducing waste and vendor complexity.

Summary

Corewell Health consolidated three legacy hospital systems’ disparate nutrition platforms into a single Illumina (NetMenu) instance integrated with Epic after its one-instance Epic go-live. The unified system standardizes recipes, products and diet nomenclature across 24 hospitals, matches patient diets from Epic to menu items in real time, and flags allergens and nutritional mismatches. That integration reduced food waste and purchasing complexity, cut costs through standardized sourcing, and improved patient safety and meal personalization. The project required an 18-month data-alignment effort to achieve a single, centrally managed nutrition ecosystem.

Original Description

Trying to stitch together legacy software after a merger is a guaranteed way to bleed productivity. The smartest health systems bypass the politics and build from scratch.

Anthony Boggs, Senior Director of Support Services at Corewell Health, reveals how his team completely overhauled their foodservice operations following a massive three-system merger. He shares how standardizing on Illumia NetMenu and connecting it directly to Epic eliminated food waste and automated patient dietary safety. You will learn the exact strategy they used to cut food SKUs by 70 percent and why retail operations actually dictate hospital food tech.

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Learn more about Corewell Health at https://corewellhealth.org/

Learn more about Illumia at https://illumiatech.com/

Find more great health IT content at https://www.healthcareittoday.com/

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⏰ Jump to the Moments That Matter

0:00 The Hospital Merger Hangover

2:45 Operating as Three Departments Instead of One

5:30 Epic as the Anchor for Change

8:18 Why a Chicken Breast is Not Always a Chicken Breast

9:10 Getting Staff Buy-In by Blowing Things Up

11:47 Finding the ROI in Vendor Consolidation

14:24 The Retail Mentality and Data Visibility

18:32 The 80 Percent Retail Reality

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