How to Move From a Health System Role Into Epic Consulting
Considering a move into Epic consulting? Learn how to assess your experience, prepare for consulting, evaluate opportunities, and take the next step.
If you work with Epic inside a health system, you may have wondered whether consulting could be the right next step.
Consulting can expose you to new organizations, challenges, and ways of working. It can help you deepen your specialty, broaden your Epic knowledge, and build relationships across the healthcare technology community.
But moving into consulting is not simply a matter of updating your resume and applying for a new job. Before making the leap, it helps to understand what you offer, what you want from consulting, and how the work may differ from your current role.
At Incisive Consultants, our talent team has built a vetted network of 7,600+ expert consultants, many of whom have made the leap from a health system into a consulting role. We’ve mined their experiences and compiled the lessons learned into these seven steps that can help you prepare for a transition into consulting as well.
1. Get Clear About Why You Want to Consult
Start by asking a simple question: why consulting? In other words, what do you find appealing about it?
Are you looking for greater variety? Do you want to specialize more deeply in an application or type of project? Are you interested in working with different health systems? Do you want more flexibility or a new professional challenge?
There is no single right answer, but knowing what you want will help you evaluate opportunities more thoughtfully.
Consider questions such as:
What parts of my current role do I enjoy most?
What types of projects give me energy?
Do I prefer long-term ownership or shorter, defined engagements?
Am I comfortable joining an unfamiliar team and getting up to speed quickly?
What would I like my career to look like in three to five years?
Your answers can help you determine whether consulting fits your goals and if so, what type of consulting work you should pursue.
REMEMBER: The best next opportunity is not simply the one that matches your Epic credentials. It should also fit the kind of work you want to do.
2. Take Inventory of Your Experience
Your value as a consultant extends beyond your technical Epic knowledge.
Health system experience gives you an understanding of the people, priorities, and processes behind the technology. You have seen how a workflow change affects clinicians, how decisions move through an organization, and what teams need to adopt a new system or process successfully.
Create an inventory of the experience you could bring to a client, including:
Epic applications and modules you have supported
Certifications and proficiencies
Implementations, upgrades, and go-lives
Optimization or workflow-improvement projects
Testing and validation responsibilities
Provider or end-user education
Project management and team leadership
Cross-functional collaboration
Problems you helped resolve
Measurable improvements you helped produce
Don’t focus only on your job description. Think about specific moments when you helped a project move forward, solved a difficult problem, or made work easier for users.
3. Identify (and Address) Any Gaps
No one knows everything before becoming a consultant. What is important, however, is understanding where your experience is strongest and where you may need to develop more.
Review consulting roles that interest you. Which qualifications appear consistently? Are employers looking for experience with a certain application, project phase, or type of health system?
You may be able to close a gap by:
Volunteering for a new project within your health system
Taking on more responsibility during an upgrade or go-live
Building experience with training, testing, or optimization
Strengthening your project management skills
Pursuing an additional Epic certification when possible
Asking a colleague or mentor for exposure to another area
DID YOU KNOW? Soft skills like clear communication, sound judgment, adaptability, and the ability to build trust can be just as important as technical expertise.
4. Learn How Consulting Work Is Different
Consultants are often expected to enter a new environment, understand the challenge, and begin contributing quickly.
That requires curiosity and humility. What worked at your health system may not be the best answer for another organization. Each client has its own goals, culture, workflows, governance structure, and resource constraints.
Successful consultants know how to ask good questions before recommending a solution, listen to stakeholders, and adapt to different organizational cultures
Change is also central to consulting (whether it’s projects, teams, or responsibilities). So before making a move, consider whether that kind of continual change of pace and variety are appealing to you.
5. Rework Your Resume Around Results
A consulting resume should not only show where you have worked and which applications you know, but also what you contributed.
Instead of listing a responsibility such as “supported Epic ambulatory workflows,” explain the setting, challenge, and result.
For example:
Supported Epic Ambulatory optimization across 15 outpatient clinics, partnering with clinical and operational leaders to improve workflows and user adoption.
Whenever possible, include the scale of the work and the outcome. Relevant details might include the number of facilities, users, applications, workflows, or team members involved.
6. Talk With People Who Know the Work
You do not have to wait until you are ready to apply before talking with consulting professionals.
Reach out to former colleagues who have made the transition. Ask what surprised them? What do they wish they had known? Which skills mattered most as a new consultant?
These conversations can give you a more realistic picture of consulting while helping you build relationships before beginning a formal job search.
7. Evaluate Consulting Firms
Like in any job interview, take the opportunity to understand how the firm operates.
To learn how they treat and support consultants, ask questions like:
How do you match consultants with client engagements?
What happens when an engagement ends?
Who will support me if an issue arises with a client?
What does success look like in the first six months?
How long do consultants typically stay with the firm?
Pay attention to whether the firm is interested in your goals or simply trying to fill an immediate opening. A strong consulting relationship should work for the client, the firm, and the consultant.
Your Epic Consulting Readiness Checklist
Finally, before beginning your search, make sure you can clearly explain the:
Epic expertise you bring
Projects and challenges you have handled
Results you have helped achieve
Types of consulting work you want
Environments in which you do your best work
Skills you want to develop next
Travel, schedule, and engagement length personal preferences
Take the Next Step With Incisive
At Incisive Consultants, we connect experienced Epic professionals with health systems that need their expertise across implementation, optimization, provider education, Community Connect, and ongoing support.
We also recognize that making the move into consulting is a significant career decision. Our goal is to understand what you bring to the table, what kind of work interests you, and where you want your career to go next.
Explore the Incisive consultant network and current opportunities, or connect with Incisive on LinkedIn.