HRRMC Pauses Public Recording During EPIC System Demonstration

Key Takeaways

• HRRMC is adopting EPIC through Aspen Valley Health’s Community Connect program.
• The board stopped recording during the EPIC demonstration, raising questions about public oversight.
• Strong June financial results arrive as HRRMC develops goals for staffing, inventory, productivity, and growth.

Heart of the Rockies Regional Medical Center is moving toward a new electronic health record system, but an early presentation about the technology has also created a governance question for the publicly funded hospital.

During its July 28 meeting, the HRRMC Board of Directors received an overview of the EPIC platform from Aspen Valley Health. HRRMC plans to obtain the system through Epic’s Community Connect program, under which Aspen Valley Health will extend its existing Epic environment to HRRMC.

The arrangement offers a practical route into a large EHR ecosystem without HRRMC independently building and operating every component. Community Connect deployments can provide smaller hospitals with access to technology, support resources, and interoperability capabilities associated with a larger health system.

For patients, the expected features include online appointment scheduling, test results, medication information, and the ability to enter medical details. Imaging reports and results from HRRMC Direct Access Testing are also expected to become available through the platform. Providers should gain greater visibility into care delivered at other hospitals, including UC Health.

That kind of information exchange is a primary focus of federal health IT policy. The federal Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy and Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology describes interoperability as the ability of health information systems to exchange and use electronic health data. Meanwhile, HHS guidance addresses patients’ rights to inspect or obtain copies of health information held by covered entities.

Implementation, however, involves more than switching on a patient portal. Workflow configuration, data migration, staff training, identity management, access controls, testing, and integration with existing clinical systems can consume substantial time. HRRMC will be able to customize many features, but each local choice can affect cost, training, and long-term support.

During the meeting, the public did not get a recorded account of the demonstration.

The board stopped recording that portion of the open meeting. “EPIC is obviously sensitive about their proprietary product, and so this isn’t being recorded like the rest of our meeting will be,” the HRRMC chief executive officer said.

Protecting proprietary product details can be a legitimate vendor concern. Still, stopping a recording during a publicly noticed session creates a separate accountability issue, particularly when the project involves a public hospital and potentially significant operational resources. Was it feasible to present nonproprietary information in public while reserving narrowly defined confidential material for another setting?

The incident raised concern that the decision may not align with Colorado’s Open Meeting Laws. The Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition provides an overview of the state’s open-meetings requirements and the circumstances surrounding executive sessions. The meeting account does not establish whether HRRMC’s action violated the law, but it does point to questions the board could address publicly, including what information was withheld, what legal basis supported the recording decision, and how future technology oversight will remain accessible.

Financially, HRRMC enters the project from a comparatively strong June. Net patient revenue reached $15.2 million against a $14.6 million budget. Operating expenses were $14.2 million, which was $433,000 favorable to budget. Monthly net operating income approached $1.7 million, more than $1 million above budget.

Year-to-date operating income was nearly $4 million against a $1.5 million budget, producing a favorable variance of $2.4 million. Gross patient revenue for June was almost $35 million and $5 million higher than in June 2025.

“It was a really busy month,” the vice president of finance said. The board chair added that the increase was distributed across multiple departments and services rather than concentrated in one area.

Even with that performance, the chief executive officer warned of a “very hostile external environment” and said HRRMC would need to become leaner and more efficient. Draft strategic goals cover people, service, quality, finance, and growth. Proposed measures include turnover, employee engagement, vacancy rates, education completion, and service volume.

The plan also considers reducing HRRMC’s roughly $8.5 million supply inventory by 5% and increasing physician encounters by 4% per FTE. One board director cautioned that productivity targets could drift into micromanaging physicians’ patient-care decisions. Another board director responded that physician education would be important.

That tension will matter during the EPIC rollout. EHR implementations can improve access and coordination, but productivity targets imposed at the same time may complicate training and adoption. For HRRMC, the technology decision is only part of the story. Transparent oversight, realistic staffing expectations, and clear measures of patient benefit will shape whether the investment delivers what the hospital expects.