Epic Cheers: A Comprehensive Guide to Healthcare’s Native CRM

Posted in EPIC

Epic Cheers is Epic’s healthcare CRM for managing patient outreach, contact center, and follow-up within the Epic system. Its role is becoming more relevant as most patient access is now online. In 2024, 65% of people in the United States were offered and accessed an online medical record or patient portal, compared with 25% in 2014. That increase gives health systems more ways to reach patients, but it also creates more communication, scheduling, and follow-up work. A portal can deliver a message, but it cannot ensure that an appointment is available, a patient request reaches the right team, or the intended care is completed. Health systems still need to coordinate outreach with clinical data, provider availability, call center workflows, consent rules, and staff ownership. Epic Cheers application is designed to support that coordination. To assess whether it fits an organization, healthcare leaders first need to understand what it includes and where it sits within Epic.

What Is Epic Cheers?

Epic Cheers is Epic’s own customer relationship tool and is sold as part of the regular Epic lineup, not as a separate add-on. It is a CRM platform that supports hospitals and health systems to personalize patient outreach, automate appointment follow-ups, and manage communications over text, email, and voice notes. 

Epic started building it around 2020 because COVID pushed hospitals toward online patient outreach. They officially launched it at the HIMSS conference in 2022 and have kept adding to it ever since.

Epic Cadence handles scheduling, Epic Prelude is for registration, and the MyChart module is for patients to log in and message their doctor. Epic Cheers application is next to all of these, handling outreach, call center work, marketing campaigns, and tracking new patient leads. But it’s not a separate database; it reads and writes to the same patient record as everything else. 

Epic has described this as one shared codebase across all their tools, so something as small as a patient’s preferred language, once entered anywhere, shows up everywhere else automatically. No extra setup needed. However, you can’t buy Epic Cheers separately. It’s not built to manage relationships with people who aren’t a part of the Epic system you are using. 

What Epic Cheers Module Does Across the Patient Journey

Call Center Support

• Call management is one of the more established parts of Cheers and is often an early implementation area. When a patient calls, staff may be able to view previous interactions with the organization. That context can support billing questions, appointment requests, provider changes, and other service needs.
• Staff can also search for providers by location, specialty, and new-patient availability during the call. This may reduce the need to place patients on hold, use a separate provider directory, or send a request to another team.
• Cheers can also route a question to another department and track whether follow-up is still required. The result depends on the quality of the underlying information. If provider data, scheduling rules, or department ownership are inaccurate, Cheers will display or route that inaccurate information more efficiently.

Automated Outreach

• Epic Cheers can identify patients who meet defined criteria, such as being overdue for a mammogram, vaccination, or chronic-care follow-up.
• The system can then send outreach through channels such as MyChart, email, or text, depending on the organization’s setup and communication policies.
• Unlike a basic reminder application, Cheers may use information already held in Epic. Depending on the use case, this may include treatment history, previous missed appointments, preferred language, or documented social factors that affect access to care.

This does not mean every available data point should be used in a message. The organization still needs to decide:

• Which patients qualify
• Which patients should be excluded
• What information can appear in the communication
• Which channel is appropriate
• What action the patient should take
• Who handles the response
• What happens when the patient does not respond

Automated outreach can increase the number of patients contacted. It can also increase call volume, staff tasks, and appointment demand. Those effects should be planned before a campaign begins.

Tracking New Leads

• Epic Cheers CRM also includes functions intended to connect a person’s initial interest with later scheduling and care.
• For example, a person may search for a physician online, submit an inquiry, speak with a scheduler, book an appointment, and eventually complete a visit. A CRM can help connect those steps so that marketing and access teams can measure more than website clicks or form submissions.
• Public information about this part of Cheers is more limited than information about call management and care-gap outreach. Epic has indicated that consumer and lead-management functions remain an area of development.

Health systems considering Cheers for patient acquisition should therefore confirm how it handles:

• People who do not yet have an Epic record
• Duplicate identities
• Website inquiries
• Lead ownership
• Response times
• Service-line routing
• Appointment conversion
• Completed-visit attribution

Affect of Epic Cheers Application on Patient Care & Healthcare Operations

Epic Cheers is most relevant when an organization currently manages high-volume outreach or call center work through spreadsheets, separate tools, manual reports, and one-off phone calls.

Community Health Network is one example frequently cited by Epic and implementation partners. The organization used Cheers to follow up with patients who were overdue for mammograms. Before Cheers, staff reportedly generated reports and called patients individually.

Expanding the Reach of Preventive Outreach

Automated outreach does not improve care simply because software sends the message.

It may affect care by allowing an organization to contact more eligible patients than staff could reasonably reach by phone.

A coordinator may only have enough time to call a limited number of patients each month. Patients beyond that limit may receive no outreach, even when they meet the same clinical criteria. Automation removes part of that staffing limit.

But it introduces a different risk; patients who need personal assistance may receive the same automated message as patients who can act without help.

This may include:

• Patients with repeated missed appointments
• Patients with transportation problems
• Patients with language or accessibility needs
• Patients with complex clinical histories
• Patients who need an explanation before making a decision
• Patients who cannot use digital scheduling

Campaign design should separate patients who can complete the process through self-service from those who may need a call, navigator, or clinical follow-up.

Improving Consistency in Contact Center 

For call centers, the main operational effect is often greater consistency. Staff can work from the same interaction history, provider information, and scheduling data rather than relying on individual knowledge or separate systems that may not reflect recent changes.

This can reduce variation between agents, but only when the organization has standard rules.

Health systems still need to define:

• Which requests agents can resolve
• Which appointments they can schedule
• When a request requires clinical review
• When a call should be transferred
• Who owns the issue after transfer
• What information must be documented
• When a request is considered closed

Where Epic Cheers May Have an Advantage Over a Standalone Healthcare CRM

The relevant comparison is not Epic Cheers vs Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, or another CRM. The main difference is that an outside CRM must exchange data with the EHR, while Cheers operates within Epic’s environment.

Data Synchronization

A separate CRM usually needs interfaces to receive scheduling, registration, provider, and clinical information from the EHR and to send relevant updates back.

These connections may use standards and methods such as HL7, FHIR, APIs, interfaces, or scheduled data feeds.

The work includes:

• Building the connection
• Testing data movement
• Matching patient identities
• Managing errors
• Monitoring failures
• Updating interfaces when systems change
• Deciding which system owns each field
• Managing the delay between source data and the CRM copy

Any delay can create errors. A patient may receive a reminder for a screening that was recently completed but has not yet been updated in the external CRM. Because Cheers works from the same Epic record used by applications such as Cadence and Prelude, some of that duplication and synchronization work may be reduced.

This does not remove every integration requirement. Phone systems, websites, forms, data warehouses, consumer platforms, and non-Epic systems may still need separate connections.

Marketing Depth

External CRMs may provide broader marketing functions developed for industries beyond healthcare. Cheers is more closely tied to clinical, scheduling, outreach, and contact center work inside Epic.

These can include:

• Advertising management
• Multi-channel campaign design
• Lead scoring
• Consumer journey management
• Channel attribution
• Employer relationship management
• Donor management
• Community partner management
• Business-to-business sales processes

Health systems with broad marketing needs may continue using another CRM alongside Cheers. In that model, Epic Cheers application may handle outreach tied to Epic data, while the other system manages general marketing or relationships outside the patient record.

Running two systems may be appropriate, but the division of responsibility should be decided before implementation.

The organization should define:

• Which system owns the consumer profile
• Which system manages consent
• Which system runs each campaign
• Which system records responses
• Where staff complete follow-up
• How duplicates are handled
• Which system reports the final outcome

Epic Cheers Use Cases With the Strongest Business Potential

Not every workflow gets the same payoff from Epic Cheers CRM, and organizations that try to do everything at once usually end up doing all of it half-well. The use cases with the clearest track record share one thing: high volume, and a clear rule for who needs to be contacted, based on info that’s already sitting in the chart.

• Closing gaps in preventive care: Things like mammograms, colon cancer screenings, and immunizations, especially anything tied to quality measures or value-based contracts, where you can define the list of who needs outreach with a simple rule.
• Bringing the call center together: Replacing a patchwork of department phone lines and separate ticket systems with one shared view of caller history. This matters most for systems that grew through mergers and ended up with a mess of different call center tools.
• Filling open slots: Reaching out proactively when there’s a cancellation or same-day opening, and pushing patients toward booking online instead of calling in.
• Checking in after discharge or for chronic conditions: Lower-stakes follow-up that doesn’t need clinical judgment, but benefits from being timely and actually relevant to that patient’s care.
• Catching patients who’ve moved elsewhere: Spotting people whose records suggest they’ve been getting specialty care outside your network, using data you already have.

Epic Cheers Implementation Requirement 

Cheers depends on the quality of the Epic applications and data around it. Cadence scheduling and Prelude registration need to be stable and trusted. If scheduling, registration, contact, or provider data is inaccurate, Epic Cheers CRM may use that inaccurate information in outreach and call center workflows.

Four implementation areas require attention:

Moving your data over:

If you’re switching from an old CRM or a manual tracking process, you’ll need to migrate call history, past campaign results, and patient contact records. 

Connecting your phone system:

This is the most common complaint in independent user feedback. Epic Cheers is great at pulling data together inside Epic, but it wasn’t originally built to be a phone system itself. Users report needing real, deliberate effort to connect it cleanly with existing phone lines and automated phone menus.

Having the right people:

Building and running Epic Cheers needs Epic-certified analysts with Epic Cheers-specific training, with the Cadence and Prelude analysts most Epic hospitals already have. This is a recent specialty in an already tight job market for Epic analysts. Organizations that assume their existing scheduling analysts can just pick up Cheers work on the side, without extra headcount, tend to see their timelines slip.

Sorting out consent and compliance ahead of time:

Under HIPAA, there’s a real difference between messages that count as treatment or normal healthcare operations, and messages that count as marketing. A reminder tied to a documented gap in someone’s care is probably fine as a treatment-related message. A message promoting a new service line looks more like marketing, and may need separate consent. You also need a solid opt-in process for text messages, given the legal risk around unwanted texts. 

Epic Cheers Implementation Roadmap

Health systems that roll Epic Cheers in stages usually have a smoother time than those that try to flip everything at once. The call center changes and the automated campaign work need different kinds of readiness, at different times.

Step1: Check your Foundation

Make sure Epic Cadence and Prelude data is actually reliable, not just technically live. Settle your rules around treatment versus marketing messages with compliance before you build any campaign logic, not after.

Step 2: Start with the Call Center

Turn on the call management and provider lookup features in one department or one call queue first. This gives you real, visible value with the least clinical risk, and it lets staff get used to a new system before you add automated campaigns on top.

Step 3: Run One Campaign 

Pick one clear, high-volume gap in care. Several early Cheers users reportedly started with mammogram follow-up, and treat it as a genuine test with a success measure you agree on ahead of time, not one you pick after seeing how it went.

Step 4: Expansion

Once the pilot’s mechanics are working, apply the same approach to more care gaps, and start connecting it to self-scheduling and filling open appointment slots.

Step 5: Track Real Outcomes

Build toward Epic Cheers campaigns that use richer clinical detail, and connect that campaign activity to actual outcomes. Completed visits, closed care gaps, quality measures hit. That’s how you tell the difference between a campaign that created activity and one that actually got results.

Epic Cheers Case Studies: What the Reported Results Prove

The most frequently cited example is Community Health Network’s mammography follow-up program.

According to figures shared by Epic and repeated by implementation partners, the program resulted in approximately 9,000 new MyChart users, more than 5,000 additional preventive visits and screenings, and about $37,000 in annual labor savings compared with the previous manual process.

Some implementation-partner articles also cite an approximately 25-fold increase in mammography screenings. Public materials do not consistently state:

• The starting number
• The measurement period
• The exact comparison
• Whether the result refers to scheduled or completed screenings
• What other changes occurred during the same period

A 25-fold increase from a small starting number has a different meaning from the same increase in an established screening program.

The more specific figures for MyChart registrations, preventive visits, and reported labor savings are easier to interpret, but they still come from the vendor, implementation partners, and the participating health system rather than an independent evaluation.

The reported results show that the workflow can produce measurable outcomes in one defined care-gap program. They do not predict what another organization will achieve across different campaigns, populations, staffing models, or appointment capacity.

Epic has also discussed Stanford’s use of Cheers for outreach based on clinical history. Public information supports the existence of that capability, but detailed outcome figures are limited.

When reviewing a case study, ask for:

• The baseline
• The eligible population
• The Epic Cheers campaign size
• The response rate
• The completed-care rate
• The measurement period
• Staff time before and after
• Appointment capacity
• Implementation cost
• Ongoing operating cost
• Other changes that may have affected the result

A pilot demonstrates whether an approach worked under a defined set of conditions. It should not be treated as a forecast for an enterprise-wide rollout.

Common Epic Cheers Implementation Risks

A few problems show up often enough in real user feedback and staffing patterns that you should expect them, not treat them as bad luck.

People underestimate the phone system work:

User comments collected by KLAS specifically call out phone system and automated menu integration as a weaker spot compared to how well Cheers handles data inside Epic. Teams that assume “it’s an Epic product, so it’ll just connect”.

Staffing is treated as an afterthought:

Epic Cheers certification with analysts with your existing Epic Cadence and Prelude team. Organizations that don’t budget for dedicated people assume that current scheduling staff can just absorb the extra work, but this makes their build timelines slip.

Confusion between marketing tool and operations tool:

Some teams use Epic Cheers expecting the kind of functions you’d get from a dedicated marketing platform but end up disappointed when it doesn’t do that, because that was never really what it was built for.

Running two systems:

Organizations already using Salesforce or another CRM for donor relationships, employer accounts, or general marketing often just keep that system running alongside Epic Cheers instead of merging the two. That can be a perfectly reasonable outcome, but it should be a decision you make on purpose, not something you realize after both systems are already up and running.

Is Epic Cheers the Right CRM for Your Health System?

Cheers is most likely to fit organizations that:

• Already use Epic broadly
• Have stable Cadence and Prelude environments
• Need to solve a defined, high-volume problem
• Depend on clinical or scheduling data for outreach
• Want to support call center work inside Epic
• Have analyst and operational resources available
• Can measure the result

Epic Cheers is less likely to meet the full requirement when:

• The organization does not use Epic
• Advanced advertising is the primary need
• Multi-brand marketing is central
• The health system uses several EHRs
• Recently acquired sites remain on other platforms
• Most relevant consumer data sits outside Epic
• The CRM must manage employer, donor, research, or B2B relationships

Epic Cheers Readiness Checklist

• Cadence and Prelude are stable and trusted by staff
• Registration and scheduling data are accurate
• Rules for treatment, operational, and marketing messages are documented
• Text-message consent and opt-out processes have been reviewed
• Dedicated Cheers analyst time is budgeted
• Phone and automated menu integration has been scoped
• One defined pilot has been selected
• Success measures are agreed on before launch
• Contact center training time is included
• A temporary drop in productivity is expected
• Provider data has a named owner
• Appointment capacity has been confirmed
• Response ownership and escalation rules are documented
• Existing CRM tools have been reviewed
• The organization has decided which systems will be retained, replaced, or used in parallel

Integrate Epic with Folio3 Digital Health 

Epic Cheers gives health systems a CRM within the Epic environment they are using, but the setup often involves more complex functions. Teams may need help building outreach campaigns, connecting existing phone systems, bringing website inquiries into Epic, and linking marketing data with patient access workflows.

Folio3 Digital Health supports this work as an Epic Vendor Services Provider. This includes setting up integrating and setting up Epic Cheers and all its related tasks. All Epic integrations also protect patient information, follow HIPAA requirements, and maintain clear audit records.

Closing Note

Epic Cheers’ real advantage is one shared patient record across scheduling, registration, clinical care, and outreach. It is hard for any other CRM to copy these functions offered. But that advantage only turns into results if everything around it is solid. A clean registration data feeding it, clear compliance rules about what it’s allowed to send, staff who actually know how to build and maintain it, and a way of measuring outcomes instead of just activity. The organizations getting real value out of Epic Cheers today aren’t doing so because the software is amazing on its own. They’re winning because they picked one clear problem to solve, built the process around it carefully, and checked what actually happened before deciding what to automate next.

Frequently Asked Questions 

1. Is Epic Cheers included with a regular Epic license?

No, Epic’s healthcare-specific CRM platform, Cheers, is not included with a standard Epic EHR license. 

2. How does Cheers deal with HIPAA rules around marketing messages? 

Epic Cheers manages HIPAA rules for marketing by integrating with secure, authentic channels like MyChart and does not rely on standard, non-secure text and email for protected health information.

3. What’s the biggest reason Cheers projects don’t live up to expectations? 

Based on what users report, the two biggest reasons are underestimating the phone system integration work and underestimating the dedicated staff Cheers needs beyond your existing Cadence and Prelude team.

4. How to request an Epic Cheers demo?

An Epic Cheers demo is arranged through Epic for organizations that already use, or are evaluating, the Epic system. The demo should cover the workflows most relevant to your health system, such as patient outreach, call management, provider search, MyChart scheduling, and campaign reporting. 

About the Author