Managing big data is essential to organizational efficiency and patient safety, especially in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Fully integrated with MEDITECH’s EHR, Business and Clinical Analytics (BCA) provides clinicians and decision makers with a single source of truth for critical information, giving staff real-time access to metrics that uncover insights to help them provide the best care possible.

Here are 3 success stories showing how healthcare organizations have used BCA to ensure staff are equipped with the right data and resources to provide quality care.

In healthcare, patient safety and quality of care are the highest priorities. As President of Healthien Inc. healthcare consulting services, I help providers meet these priorities by addressing pharmacy and order management-related issues that could result in adverse patient events.

In my experience, the most effective way to maximize patient safety is by having an automated clinical decision support system (CDSS) that protects patients from errors and omissions, while also streamlining providers’ workflows. Creating this type of CDSS requires innovation and a customizable EHR like MEDITECH Expanse.

For many of us in healthcare, living through this time of crisis has been an experience like no other. This is especially true for nurses and nurse informaticists, who are providing so much clinical, technological, and emotional support for care teams as well as their communities. The Year of the Nurse has been quite a year. We need your light now more than ever.

For our latest Thought Leader podcast, I spoke with Dr. Andy Burchett, CMIO of Avera Health, about his organization’s rapid response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Recently, I was fortunate enough to return to speak at my second MEDITECH Nurse Forum. But this one was a bit different, because when I say “return” I actually didn’t go anywhere, unless you count the walk down the hall to my guest room. I missed seeing you all as I am sure you all missed spending time together in person. But things look a little different lately don’t they?

Recently, MEDITECH's Carol Bird had an opportunity to sit down with Dr. Doug Kanis, an Internist and CMIO at Pella Regional Health Center (Pella, IA). They discussed how Expanse's intuitive design, mobility, and interoperability helps physicians increase efficiency and improve patient care. The excerpts below are a few highlights from their conversation. To learn more about his experience using Expanse, watch our video interview with Dr. Kanis.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth has gained recognition as an effective and sustainable step for slowing the spread of the virus. Bridging the gaps between patients, physicians, and health systems, telehealth enables communication through virtual channels, protecting the public and the medical staff on the frontlines.

The COVID-19 pandemic has called for everyone to do their part to keep others safe and healthy. For many, this means staying at home as much as possible and practicing social distancing. For me, as CMIO of the Beth Israel Deaconess community hospitals, this has meant deploying numerous initiatives in response to the pandemic, from symptom screening to dashboards to telehealth.

As an emergency medicine physician, this has also meant working on the frontlines at my organization's emergency departments and volunteering in New York City, which ultimately led to me contracting the virus myself.

There’s nothing quite like a pandemic to get you to reflect on your ten-year cancer anniversary.

I became a self-taught expert in navigating the U.S. healthcare system beginning around February 2010, when I was 35. I was sitting at work one morning and I felt an explosive pain in my abdomen. A can’t-breathe, can’t-move kind of pain. I knew it wasn’t normal, but I wanted to convince myself that bodies are weird and do weird things, and I’d worry about it if it happened again. And, of course, it happened again soon enough.

The COVID-19 pandemic is changing the way we all do things. How we work, communicate, and problem solve looks quite different from what most of us are used to. However, what I’ve seen over the past several months reminds me that necessity really is the mother of invention — and reinvention. The crisis is challenging us to innovate and reengineer for this new reality.