Epic Bones: A Guide for Epic Orthopedic Module

Posted in EPIC

Epic Bones is Epic’s orthopedics module that specially supports orthopaedists’ clinical review, documentation, ordering, and procedural workflows, and includes joint injection support. It offers a “one-screen” documentation view and location-based charting that organizes the record by body part. Epic Bones runs in EpicCare, rather than as a separate product, so it shares one chart with every other specialty. The American Joint Replacement Registry (AJRR) in its 2024 annual report analyzed more than 3.7 million hip and knee procedures from 1,447 institutions. This registry reporting matters because CMS now requires hospitals to report patient-reported outcome scores for elective hip and knee replacement, with payment attached. This guide explains what the Epic integrated module “Bones” is, what it does, and how it differs from EpicCare and Epic Bridges.

What is the Epic Bones Module?

Epic Bones is an application for orthopedics. According to Epic’s product documentation, Bones supports orthopaedists’ clinical review, documentation, ordering, and procedural workflows. 

Epic names most of its specialty applications with a short word rather than a clinical label: 

• Beacon for oncology
• Cupid for cardiology
• Beans for nephrology
• Wisdom for dentistry

Epic Bones is built around how orthopedic clinics actually work. Medical care is organized by anatomy, so a patient presents for a specific left knee, right shoulder, or lumbar segment. Bones uses location-based charting, which makes the body location a structured element of the encounter rather than free text that a clinician types at every visit and an analyst has to parse later. 

The workflows Epic Built Specifically for Orthopedic Clinics

An orthopedic clinic note differs in structure from a general clinic note, and three of Epic Bones’ design choices reflect that difference.

Charting by Body Location

Orthopedic care is organized around anatomy, since a patient presents for a specific left knee, right shoulder, or lumbar segment. A general note structure requires the clinician to enter that context as free text at every visit, leaving the information in a form that is difficult to report on. 

Epic Bones uses location-based charting, so the body location is a structured element of the encounter from the outset rather than a sentence that must be written and later parsed. In a clinic seeing thirty hip and knee patients a day, that structure determines whether the data is measurable.

Documenting Joint and Soft-tissue Injections

Injections are among the most common procedures in an orthopedic or sports medicine clinic, which is why Epic identifies joint injection support as a specific component of Epic Bones. Each injection involves the same set of details, like the joint, the side, the substance and dose, the approach, any imaging guidance, and lot numbers. 

Providing this as a supported workflow rather than a blank note reduces the number of clicks and captures the procedure as structured data that flows directly into orders and charges rather than being retyped.

Keeping the Visit on One Screen

Epic’s term for this is “one screen” orthopedic documentation. The intent is to present what a provider needs for a visit in a single working view: the relevant history, the location-based exam, the imaging, and the plan, rather than the same information spread across separate tabs. 

How closely a given installation matches that depends on how the organization has configured it, and a default configuration and a fully built one differ in daily use.

Is Epic Bones a Part of EpicCare? 

Yes. The Epic Bones module is not a separate system; orthopedic centers run it with EpicCare, Epic’s core ambulatory record, and the two function as a single chart. A surgeon documenting a knee in Bones writes into the same patient record used by the primary care physician, the radiologist, and the billing team.

EpicCare is the general ambulatory record used across every specialty in an Epic environment. Epic Bones is the orthopedic layer, adding location-based documentation. 

Most orthopedic groups in an Epic shop use both together rather than choosing between them: EpicCare provides the shared record and the cross-specialty data, and Bones provides the orthopedic content. 

Eye care follows the same pattern with Kaleidoscope, cardiology with Cupid, and oncology with Beacon. Epic builds the specialty layer inside the EHR so the specialty content is tailored while the patient record beneath it stays shared across the care team.

Epic Bones vs Epic Bridges

Bones and Bridges sound alike and are frequently simultaneously used, but they do unrelated jobs. Epic Bones is the orthopedics application, Epic Bridges is Epic’s interface engine, the tool teams use to build and maintain the connections that move data between Epic and systems outside it. 

Epic Bridges

• Bridges supports HL7 interfaces and other communication protocols
• Handles the configuration and monitoring of interface messages.

Epic Bones 

Bones cannot, on their own, add outside imaging or third-party data to appear in the chart. That depends on the integration work underneath, which is where Bridges, along with DICOM and other interface engineering, does the actual connecting. 

A team that wants imaging from a non-Epic PACS to show up alongside the orthopedic note is describing a Bridges and integration task, not a Bones feature. Keeping the two straight prevents a common planning error in which an organization expects the orthopedic application to deliver connectivity that has to be built separately.

Epic Bones Certification, Training, and How to Learn It

Working in any Epic application, Epic Bones included, requires training through the employing organization, and access is tied to that training. Most health systems assign Epic curricula through an internal learning platform, and clinicians complete the relevant orthopedic modules before they receive access. 

Several teaching organizations publish Bones provider courses that cover the orthopedic workflow, documenting the surgical consult visit, preparing for a procedure, and interpreting X-rays, aimed at ambulatory physicians, residents, and advanced practice clinicians.

There is an important distinction between proficiency and certification. Epic certification involves in-person training at Epic’s headquarters in Wisconsin and passing a certification exam, and it is almost always sponsored by an employer rather than paid for individually. 

Proficiency is a self-study designation. A person can become proficient in an application through Epic’s training materials without holding the full certification.

• For analysts and builders who configure Bones, the certification or proficiency path is the relevant one. 
• For clinicians who use it, the organization’s own training and access process is what matters. 
• Epic’s formal training resources, including documentation and roadmaps, live behind a UserWeb login, which is available to staff at organizations that run Epic.

Epic Bones for Sports Medicine

Epic positions Bones for both orthopedics and sports medicine. 

Sports medicine care is organized around the same musculoskeletal anatomy, the same joint and soft-tissue injections, and the same imaging review, so the location-based charting and injection workflows apply directly. 

Where sports medicine differs is in athlete care. Tracking an injury, a treatment course, and a return-to-activity timeline across repeated visits rather than a single surgical episode.

For teams that monitor athletes, the value of running sports medicine inside Epic Bones is the same shared record that benefits orthopedics. Functional assessments, treatment outcomes, and recovery progress sit in the same chart as imaging, surgical records, and primary care notes, so a clinician following an athlete over a season is not stitching together separate systems. 

The same patient-reported outcome tooling that supports the CMS measure for joint replacement can support outcome tracking for sports injuries, although the specific instruments and the regulatory requirements differ. The practical point is that sports medicine is not a separate Epic product; it is part of how Bones is configured and used for that population.

This matters for organizations weighing whether a single platform can cover both surgical orthopedics and sports medicine. 

Since both run inside the same Epic Bones configuration, a health system does not need a second specialty product to support an athletic medicine program. The configuration work to support return-to-play tracking and longitudinal injury histories is real, but it builds on the same application rather than requiring a new one.

How Epic Bones Connects to the Rest of Epic

Medical Imaging through Epic Radiant

The radiology application puts plain films, CT, and MRI in the same record as the orthopedic note, so a surgeon reviews the image and documents the plan without leaving the chart. Where imaging lives partly outside Epic, DICOM, and interface work decides whether those images actually appear in the “one screen” view.

The Operating Room via OpTime and OR Marketplace

These handle surgical scheduling and the use of operating-room time. Since surgery is one of the highest sources of revenue for a health system, the handoff between the clinic documentation in Bones and the surgical record matters operationally as well as clinically.

Scheduling & Patient Access Through Epic Cadence and MyChart

Orthopedics is high-volume and referral-driven, and the access workflow is where bottlenecks surface. Epic reports that WakeMed Health and Hospitals saw an increase of 75,000 visits annually and a 21% rise in outpatient revenue after combining MyChart self-scheduling, the Fast Pass wait-list tool, and changes to its scheduling processes.

Reporting via Clarity and Caboodle

Epic’s analytics and data-warehouse tools Clarity & Caboodle turn documented care into the reports used for quality measures and registry submission, including the AJRR data discussed above.

Epic vs Other Orthopedic EHRs: Cost and Fit Analysis

Factor	Epic (with Epic Bones Module)	Other Orthopedic EHR
Best fit	Large health systems and academic centers where orthopedics is one service line among many	Independent orthopedic groups and single-specialty practices
Licensing	Roughly $5,000 to $7,000 per physician for full clinical access	Often a per-user monthly subscription, in the region of $300 per user per month for some vendors
Implementation	Hospital projects commonly start near $10 million and run 12 to 24 months	Implementation in the $5,000 to $20,000 range for a focused practice deployment
Orthopedic depth	Bones adds orthopedic content on top of a full enterprise EHR	Orthopedic workflows are the entire product, often with a tighter specialty fit out of the box
Wider system	One shared record across every specialty, plus enterprise reporting and registry tooling	Strong within orthopedics, but cross-specialty data sharing depends on external integration

Independent orthopedic groups inside a larger Epic health system sometimes access Epic through Community Connect, in which a hosting organization extends its Epic environment to smaller practices for a per-provider fee. That can change the economics, but it still ties the practice to the host’s Epic instance rather than a standalone orthopedic product.

How Folio3 Digital Health Supports Epic Integration

Folio3 Digital Health helps healthcare organizations integrate and optimize Epic Bones for orthopedic and sports medicine workflows. This includes HL7 and FHIR integration, third-party system connectivity, reporting builds, workflow optimization, and data pipeline design for analytics, AI, registries, and operational improvement.

For organizations using Epic Bones, the main questions are usually around documentation quality, procedure capture, imaging connectivity, registry reporting, and how well Bones connects with the broader Epic environment. Orthopedic teams need clean handoffs across scheduling, clinical documentation, orders, imaging, procedures, surgery, rehab, billing, and reporting.

Conclusion

Epic Bones is not a standalone product. It gives orthopedic and sports medicine teams documentation built around anatomy, defined workflows, and a single working view inside Epic. That shared record is the source of most of its value, because the orthopedic encounter is visible to the rest of the care team and moves through Epic’s reporting and registry tooling like any other Epic data. Two capabilities have moved from background features to procurement questions: collecting patient-reported outcomes and submitting data to the AJRR, both now tied to a CMS requirement for hip and knee replacement. When evaluating Epic Bones, two questions matter more than any feature list. First, will it capture orthopedic care as structured data, organized by location, procedure, and outcome, rather than as free text? Second, can it reliably collect HOOS, JR, and KOOS, JR at the preoperative and postoperative windows and deliver them to CMS and the registry? For large health systems, Bones is the natural orthopedic fit. For independent groups, a dedicated orthopedic EHR is often the better economic match, and the right answer depends on where orthopedics sits in the organization.

Frequently Asked Questions 

Is Epic Bones a separate product from Epic?

No. Bones is an application within the Epic EHR. Orthopedic clinics run it alongside EpicCare, the core ambulatory record, and it shares the same patient chart, orders, and imaging links as the rest of Epic.

Does Epic Bones handle patient-reported outcomes and registry reporting?

Yes. Epic lists patient-reported outcome collection and reporting data to orthopedic registries among the capabilities Bones supports. This matters because CMS now requires hospitals to report HOOS, JR, and KOOS, JR scores for elective hip and knee replacements, and the AAOS American Joint Replacement Registry collects the same measures.

What is the difference between Bones and EpicCare?

EpicCare is Epic’s general ambulatory record used across specialties. Bones is the orthopedic layer on top of it, adding location-based documentation, joint injection support, and Epic’s one-screen orthopedic view. Most orthopedic groups use both together rather than choosing between them.

Is Epic Bones the same as Epic Bridges?

No, and the names are easy to confuse. Bones is the orthopedics application, while Bridges is Epic’s interface engine for connecting Epic to systems outside it. They do unrelated jobs.

What are the essential features of an electronic medical record for an orthopedic practice?

The non-negotiables are PACS and imaging integration (X-ray, MRI, CT viewable and annotatable in the chart), body-part-based documentation templates for fractures, joint replacements, and soft-tissue injuries, and surgical scheduling with implant tracking. Orthopedic-aware coding matters just as much, since the specialty carries heavy CPT, ICD-10, and modifier complexity. Orthopedics is highly exposed to authorization errors, coding complexity, and payer scrutiny, so prior-authorization and revenue-cycle support belong on the must-have list, not the wish list.

Which companies offer the best EHR solutions tailored for orthopedic clinics?

For large health systems, Epic remains the standard through its Bones application. Among dedicated orthopedic systems, ModMed EMA is widely regarded as the leading orthopedic-specific EHR, built by practicing orthopedists, with Phoenix Ortho, Exscribe, and Nextech serving independent groups well. athenahealth offers strong revenue cycle management with orthopedic templates, while eClinicalWorks suits cost-conscious practices. The right pick depends on practice size and whether billing or clinical depth is the priority.

What are the advantages of using an electronic health record tailored for orthopedic surgeons?

A purpose-built system matches how surgeons work daily. Documentation organized by body part, one-click treatment plans for procedures like knee arthroscopy or rotator cuff repair, and imaging reviewed inside the encounter rather than in a separate viewer. The result is fewer clicks and less time per note. Many orthopedic practices reported that generic EHRs caused workflow disruptions, which is the gap that specialty systems exist to close. Coding and operative documentation are pre-built for musculoskeletal care, reducing errors at the point of entry.

What are the benefits of using an orthopedic-specific EHR like Epic Bones over a general healthcare system?

A general EHR forces orthopedic teams through menus and templates built for every other specialty, which wastes time on every visit. An orthopedic-specific system strips that out, surfacing only the workflows surgeons need and connecting documentation directly to orthopedic billing. A specialty product is excellent within orthopedics but shares data across departments less easily than an enterprise platform like Epic. For an independent group, that focus is the advantage; for a multi-specialty system, the shared record usually wins.

Can Epic Bones track implants and devices?

Implant and device documentation is part of orthopedic surgical workflows in Epic, captured through the surgical record and the procedure documentation rather than as a Bones-only feature. Recording the device, including details such as model and lot number, supports both billing accuracy and the implant data that orthopedic registries collect, which connects back to the registry reporting Bones supports.

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