Epic Bugsy alternatives for hospital infection prevention teams, and when a platform beside Bugsy is worth paying for
Most Epic hospitals never rip Bugsy out. The real decision is whether to pay for a surveillance platform beside it, and the 2026 KLAS numbers make that decision easier to argue in either direction.
8 min read
The main Epic Bugsy alternatives are Sentri7 Infection Prevention from Wolters Kluwer, VigiLanz Infection Control Monitor from Inovalon, Premier's clinical surveillance powered by TheraDoc, and BD HealthSight Infection Advisor. Few Epic hospitals remove Bugsy. Most keep it for isolation flags and NHSN work inside the chart and run one of those platforms beside it. In KLAS's February 2026 report, Bugsy scored 80.6 out of 100, against 93.5 for Sentri7 and 90.8 for VigiLanz.
This is written for the infection prevention director, hospital epidemiologist or quality leader at an Epic hospital who has been asked whether Bugsy is enough. Bugsy is described from the KLAS findings and from Epic consultants' published descriptions, because Epic does not publish its build documentation. The other vendors are described from their own product pages. None of them publishes a price.
What KLAS found about Bugsy in 2026
KLAS surveyed 23 organizations for its 2026 report on Bugsy, with supplemental evaluations from 19 of them, and HealthSystemCIO summarized the results in February 2026. Bugsy's overall performance score was 80.6, more than seven points below the next-lowest Epic inpatient product. IT leaders and infection preventionists described two different experiences: the preventionists who use it daily reported slower support, limited product knowledge among Epic support staff and little say in the roadmap.
Custom reporting was the largest pain point. Half of respondents said self-service reporting needed a significant build, a quarter said the same of visualizations and analytics, and another 69 percent described a small lift there. Roughly one third needed more than 12 months to reach a stable, successful state, and one organization had not reached it after more than five years. Respondents did credit Epic with real progress on NHSN reporting in recent years.
The most telling number is the change after a switch. Organizations that moved to Bugsy from VigiLanz reported a notable drop in satisfaction, and those that came from BD reported a comparable decline. Several organizations had kept a best-of-breed product running beside Bugsy, or instead of it, to cover the gaps.
What Bugsy does well
Bugsy is Epic's infection control application, previously called Epic Infection Control. Consultants who implement it describe the same core: it flags patients whose microbiology results call for isolation, lets infection preventionists create and abstract cases for NHSN and state reporting, tracks surgical patients for surgical site infection surveillance, compares lab results with documentation of lines, drains and airways to surface possible CLABSI and CAUTI, and shows daily counts of patients with target organisms on a dashboard. It draws on Beaker for lab data.
Its real advantage is location. The isolation flag, the case and the patient chart are in one system that your hospital already licenses, and the infection preventionist never re-keys a patient into a second product. For a hospital with strong Epic analysts and an infection prevention team willing to own the build, that is worth a lot.
Epic Bugsy alternatives compared
Scores are KLAS overall performance scores as reported in February 2026. "Not in the summary" means the published summary did not give a score for that product.
| Product | KLAS 2026 overall score | How it relates to Epic | Built around | Price published |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Epic Bugsy | 80.6 | Inside the Epic EHR | Isolation, case abstraction, NHSN and state reporting | Part of the Epic contract |
| Sentri7 Infection Prevention (Wolters Kluwer) | 93.5, 2026 Best in KLAS | Runs beside it, integrates with the EHR | Real-time HAI and MDRO surveillance, LabID, one-click NHSN | No |
| VigiLanz Infection Control Monitor (Inovalon) | 90.8 overall, 87.9 among Epic-only customers | The product most often paired with Bugsy | Surveillance across labs, vitals, medications and notes | No |
| Premier clinical surveillance (TheraDoc) | Not in the summary | Runs beside it, direct EHR connection | Automated infection tracking and NHSN reporting tools | No |
| BD HealthSight Infection Advisor | Not in the summary, satisfaction declined over the past year | Hosted, runs beside it | HAI surveillance and cluster detection against a baseline | No |
| Antimicrobe Stewardship | Not rated | Works from the lab export, no interface | Antibiogram and quarterly MDRO rates only | $749 a month |
The platforms, one by one
Sentri7 Infection Prevention is the category leader by the only public ranking. Wolters Kluwer says it was Best in KLAS for Infection Control and Monitoring in 2026, for the fourth time in five years, and describes surveillance that flags at-risk patients, isolation protocol management, LabID event analysis, one-click NHSN submission and EHR integration.
VigiLanz Infection Control Monitor, now part of Inovalon, is the tool KLAS respondents most often run beside Bugsy. Inovalon describes surveillance across labs, vitals, medications and notes, with tracking of HAIs and MDROs and reports that go directly to NHSN. Its users and Sentri7's both gave high marks in the KLAS findings, and both groups said they want tighter integration with Epic.
Premier sells clinical surveillance powered by TheraDoc for hospitals and long-term care, with automated NHSN reporting tools and a direct EHR connection. BD HealthSight Infection Advisor with MedMined Insights is hosted HAI surveillance that compares current isolate incidence with a historic baseline to find clusters. KLAS respondents reported falling satisfaction with BD over the past year, citing staff turnover, responsiveness and limited innovation.
Side-by-side pages for each vendor are on Sentri7 alternatives, VigiLanz alternatives, TheraDoc competitors and MedMined and BD HealthSight alternatives.
Should we replace Bugsy or run a platform beside it?
For most Epic hospitals the answer is to keep Bugsy and decide whether a platform beside it earns its license. Bugsy holds the isolation flag and the chart, which nothing else does as well inside Epic. A second platform pays off when the infection prevention team loses hours every week to surveillance and reporting that Bugsy cannot produce without analyst time you do not have.
Three questions settle it. How many dedicated Epic analysts does infection prevention actually get, not on paper? How much of this year's reporting still ends in an export and a spreadsheet? And how large is the infection prevention team relative to the census? A 500 bed hospital with three preventionists and one shared analyst is the classic case for a platform. A 150 bed hospital with a strong Epic team is usually better served by finishing the Bugsy build.
KLAS tied good Bugsy outcomes to dedicated analysts and a standing meeting cadence with IT, so score your own build capacity honestly before choosing. A structured digital maturity assessment of the IT and infection prevention teams makes that conversation less political than a vendor demo does.
How much does it cost to run a platform beside Bugsy?
None of the platform vendors publishes a price. Expect a one-time implementation fee, an annual license, and an interface build between the platform and Epic, plus the IT hours to keep that interface working through Epic upgrades. The honest comparison is a three-year total from each vendor, interface included.
Bugsy's cost is different in kind. The license is part of your Epic contract, and the real spend is analyst and preventionist time: a third of KLAS respondents needed more than a year to reach a stable build. Put an hourly figure on that time before calling Bugsy the free option.
The same build or buy question on the pharmacy side is covered in Epic antimicrobial stewardship module vs third-party tools.
Where the antibiogram and resistance trends fit
Neither Bugsy nor the surveillance platforms is built to produce the facility antibiogram that CLSI M39 describes. In Epic hospitals that report usually comes out of Beaker, through a Reporting Workbench report or a custom Clarity query, and it lands on a lab or analyst queue once a year. The same goes for the question infection prevention keeps asking between antibiograms: is ESBL or CRE resistance actually rising this quarter?
Antimicrobe works from the susceptibility export the lab already produces. It builds the M39 antibiogram and, on the Stewardship plan at $749 a month, counts six MDRO phenotypes each quarter with threshold emails to the seats on the plan. It has no patient line list, no isolation flags and no NHSN submission, so it sits beside Bugsy or a platform and never replaces either.
How Epic hospitals get the antibiogram out of Beaker is covered in antibiogram software for Epic hospitals. For hospitals choosing between enterprise platforms and a lab-based tool on MDRO work, see best MDRO surveillance software for community hospitals.
Questions to ask before you decide
- Which of our reports does Bugsy produce today without an analyst, and which still end in a spreadsheet?
- How many analyst hours did our Bugsy build take last year, and what did it still leave unfinished?
- For each platform, what does the Epic interface need, and who maintains it after an Epic upgrade?
- Does the platform replace any Bugsy workflow, or only add to it? Preventionists should not work two case queues
- What is the three-year total, including implementation and interface fees?
- Who builds the annual antibiogram and the quarterly resistance trend, and from which data?
Related on this site: infection prevention software, Epic antimicrobial stewardship module, Sentri7 alternatives and competitors, antimicrobial stewardship software pricing.