When Gundersen Health System and Bellin Health merged in the summer of 2025 to form Emplify Health, the operational challenge was immediate and large: eleven hospitals, over 100 clinics, and more than 14,000 employees spread across Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Each organization had built their EHR training programs in entirely different ways. The new unified health system needed a single model to support their large-scale Epic consolidation — and fast. What they built during Project Fusion offers a clear picture of what scalable, measurable EHR education can look like when an organization brings the best of both worlds together.

Project Fusion

The consolidation Emplify Health undertook during the merger was not just technical. It was cultural. Gundersen had spent years building an asynchronous, self-paced learning model through uPerform, embedded directly within Epic's EHR via the F1 and Learning Home dashboards. Bellin Health had relied more heavily on instructor-led, classroom-based training. Bringing those two approaches into a single program required Emplify Health to build a centralized Learning Pathway: one place where clinicians and staff could find the education they needed for their role, organized so a nurse on night shift and a scheduling coordinator at a clinic two states over could both get to the right content without navigating irrelevant modules.

The results of the merger's peak activity period were measurable. Active users accessing learning content grew by 333%. Content views surged by 890%, climbing from tens of thousands per month to more than 100,000 at peak. The education approach proved equal to the moment, supporting staff through a successful Epic consolidation at scale.

Born in a Pandemic

The foundation that made Project Fusion possible was laid five years earlier. When COVID-19 arrived in 2020, Gundersen could no longer run the stand-and-deliver classroom sessions that had anchored EHR training. The team built virtual simulations and role-specific courses that new hires could complete asynchronously, with educators available in proctored virtual labs for support. It was a necessity that turned out to be an advantage. The model scaled in ways the classroom never could.

By the time the merger arrived, Gundersen had already validated the approach: new nursing staff onboarding time had been cut by 66%. New scheduling staff onboarding time had been cut by 75%. Trainers had reclaimed 43% of time previously consumed by siloed instruction, freeing them for workflow coaching and optimization support. The KLAS Research Arch Collaborative EHR Experience Survey confirmed the impact on clinicians as well. Physicians using uPerform reported a Net EHR Experience Score 16.8 points higher than peers who did not. Nurses reported a 7.3-point higher score.

The Room Went Away

The shift from classroom to coach was not simply a delivery change. It required a rethinking of where trainers could deliver the most value. Under the previous model, a single role was trained at a time per classroom, with sessions lasting between four and 16 hours, focused heavily on point-and-click instruction. Under the new model, foundational learning happened asynchronously. Trainers moved into the role of workflow coaches: present for targeted, as-needed support, available for in-person Enlighten Me Labs where learners applied what they had already practiced, and increasingly capable of working across roles rather than remaining siloed application specialists.

Emplify Health also understood that adoption required more than access. They branded the entire program "Enlighten Me," giving it a name clinicians could look for and find inside the Epic F1 dashboard. The Enlighten Me Labs brought that same identity into in-person sessions where trainers coached rather than lectured. Visibility mattered. So did the feeling that someone had thought about the experience from the clinician's side.

What 100,000 Views Tells You

The analytics capabilities Emplify Health used during Project Fusion were not just a reporting mechanism. They became a governance tool. Content view counts, launch sources, and abandoned search tracking together told the team what clinicians were looking for, whether they were finding it, and where the gaps were. After the go-live, Emplify Health ran a full content audit, reviewing content age, consolidating duplicates, and standardizing naming conventions so the library remained searchable and current. Version control ensured that shared links always pointed to the most recent workflow instructions.

That ongoing maintenance requires real time. Emplify Health recommends allocating roughly 20% of trainer capacity to content upkeep on a continuing basis. Not as overhead, but as the work that keeps the whole system credible. A library that goes stale is worse than no library at all.

What They'd Tell a Peer

The Emplify Health team is direct about what they learned. Establish naming conventions before you need them. Organize content by role and workflow. Do not duplicate foundational materials when shared content will do. Use analytics early, before the numbers have to matter for decisions. And implement in phases: do not attempt the whole transformation at once.

What runs beneath all of it is a conviction about where the human element in training belongs. Emplify Health kept in-person physician labs and instructor-led options as the model matured. Not because the asynchronous approach fell short, but because the goal was never to remove people from the process. It was to deploy them where they could deliver the most value: personalization and customization coaching, not simply lecturing in a room. That balance — asynchronous at the foundation, human at the point of care — is what carried them through a merger and continues to drive performance today.

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