My MEDITECH MD and CIO Forum Experience

I recently had the pleasure of attending the annual MEDITECH MD and CIO Forum. Not only was the venue and MEDITECH hospitality great, but they also ordered up beautiful fall weather for the event in Boston. Although, I have to admit that it must be intimidating to speak at an event hosted in the round. Luckily all of the keynotes really delivered (See my post about Ted James, MD’s keynote).

As long-time readers know, there’s almost nothing better to me than attending a user conference. At user conferences, you hear the “from the trenches” perspectives on what’s life really like on the front lines of healthcare and technology. In many cases, you listen to sessions and discussions at lunch that sounds like they’re speaking another language. For the most part, that’s basically what they’re doing. The language of an EMR user is really unique and different and it’s what makes an EHR user conference like this so special. Those attending speak the same language and are able to uniquely help each other.

Given users’ propensity to share the good, the bad, and the ugly, it was really great that MEDITECH invited me to attend their MD and CIO Forum. The good news for them is that I’ve been to enough EHR user forums that I’ve heard it all. Nothing really shocks me anymore and every EHR vendor has their challenges. In one session, someone commented on the 500 open tickets they had with support. I think it kind of scared MEDITECH that I was hearing this. However, I’d recently heard from someone using their competitor’s EHR who had 4000 open tickets. Only 500 tickets sounded quite good comparatively. Perspective and nuance really matter when you talk about problems. That’s something that’s often missed by many media these days.

While at the Forum, MEDITECH made a number of interesting announcements. Read on for details below and check out the 4 video interviews we live streamed from the conference on Facebook. The biggest announcement from my viewpoint was around voice enabling the MEDITECH EHR software. Together in partnership with Nuance, MEDITECH created a simple way for users to request information from the EHR using their voice and even to create orders. On the mobile side, they’re creating similar functionality in partnership with Google’s voice recognition. No doubt this is just the start of voice enabling the EHR.

It’s easy to see how voice will become really valuable if providers are able to get information and create orders while their hands are tied up examining the patient. MEDITECH was also smart about the voice created orders. It doesn’t just order things automatically but queues up those orders for the doctors to approve later. This is a common step we’ve seen smart vendors take when adding voice and other AI to the documentation process. We’ll see over time whether the accuracy and trust reach the point that this human verification process is no longer needed.

MEDITECH also announced a number of things around interoperability. First, outbound FHIR integrations are included in every MEDITECH EHR. Plus, they’re working on inbound FHIR integrations. They didn’t set a timeline on inbound integrations but they did say they’d be “coming soon.” MEDITECH also talked about their new API called MEDITECH Greenfield. If you want more information on Greenfield, be sure to read our interview with Niraj Chaudhry where we cover it in detail.

Another interesting announcement was MEDITECH’s new population health oriented integration with Arcadia.io. It’s great to see MEDITECH embracing outside third party data that can help their users provide better care to patients. Plus, the integration looked really seamless from a physician user perspective.

Another big takeaway for me came from a session on governance and end user buy-in. The takeaway was simple. Enduser buy-in and governance are a challenge regardless of what EHR system you choose. To get more specific insights into how to improve buy-in and governance in your organization, check out the live tweets I shared on the #MDCIO2018 hashtag on Twitter.

A few other observations from the event are that I don’t think most people appreciate what a huge step forward Expanse (their latest EHR platform) is for MEDITECH and their users. I’ve often written that there’s no one feature about EHR software that’s hard to implement. However, it’s the 1000 features you need to create a complete EHR that makes it such a challenge. It was a pretty brave thing for a 50-year-old company, MEDITECH, to go back and start nearly from scratch using the latest technology to create Expanse. That means that Expanse is still a work in progress where they’re adding features as fast as they can. However, it also is true that it might be the only EHR software that was built in the post-meaningful use era.

I was also surprised by a number of users I talked to who commented on how the price of MEDITECH really mattered to their organization. I’m not sure if these organizations had read the many stories of expensive EHR implementations damaging healthcare organizations financially or if they were just more fiscally conservative organizations. Either way, you could tell these users appreciated that MEDITECH charged a much lower price for their software than other EHR competitors out there.

All in all, I had a great experience at the MEDITECH MD and CIO Forum. Their users really reflect the culture of MEDITECH. They’re largely unassuming and just want to do what’s best for their patients. It was actually fascinating to see how the same cultures seemed to attract. No doubt, their users were still suffering from burnout like so many others. That’s common across all of healthcare. They also still had their long list of features and functions they wanted to be implemented. However, I have yet to attend an EHR user conference where that wasn’t the case.

Note: MEDITECH is a sponsor of Healthcare Scene.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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