Full speed ahead: Interoperability at MEDITECH enters a new era

As we enter the new year and prepare for more big changes ahead in 2025, we wanted to step back and reflect on the truly momentous year that just ended. In our combined four decades of experience in the industry, the two of us have never seen so much activity and excitement around the topic of interoperability as in 2024, particularly here at MEDITECH and among our customers. Here are just a few highlights of the work we accomplished this past year for advancing interoperability, and a glimpse at the road ahead.

Traverse Exchange

Traverse Exchange in the U.S.

The biggest news around interoperability here at MEDITECH was the announcement that Traverse Exchange, our national customer data exchange network, would be launched in the U.S. Leveraging what we learned building our successful national data exchange network in Canada, we have been building out an advanced infrastructure for FHIR-first data sharing.  We believe that advancing data exchange is the foundation of the modern EHR, and we’ve made remarkable progress in pushing this strategic initiative forward since our announcement in August. By the end of 2024, we had over 60 organizations with more than 200 facilities LIVE on Traverse Exchange in the US — a strong foundation that will continue to grow as we move into the new year, with the goal of onboarding all eligible Expanse customers by the end of 2025. We’re excited by how Traverse Exchange is breaking down silos, empowering care teams, and ultimately supporting organizations in maintaining their independence. By fostering collaboration with surrounding organizations, it’s enabling innovation and exceptional, patient-centered care delivery locally.

Traverse Exchange in Canada

Traverse Exchange went LIVE in Canada in March of last year and experienced rapid growth throughout the year. It now connects 19 MEDITECH hospitals in Ontario, with the remaining 24 Expanse sites in the province scheduled to join the network early this year. The network also connects over 300 long-term care sites operating the PointClickCareⓇ EHR, multiple provincial assets, and the Oracle Ontario eHub. Patients’ data now follows them between care facilities, which saves time by eliminating the need to repeat their medical history and reducing the unnecessary duplication of tests. And the initiative continues to accelerate: The network will soon expand into British Columbia. 

USCDI

In January of last year, MEDITECH became the first major EHR vendor to support USCDI v3. We are excited to announce that just one year later, we have completed the work for USCDI v4, continuing our commitment to remaining ahead of regulatory requirements. This demonstrates our ongoing commitment to ensuring that our customers have the tools they need to easily and securely share a robust data set, while also advancing data exchange. Moving forward, MEDITECH has committed to supporting new versions of USCDI as soon as the associated standards are finalized. 

MEDITECH Alliance

Traverse Exchange isn’t all that we’ve been working on in 2024. Our MEDITECH Alliance has dramatically expanded, with membership growth more than tripling, providing customers with significantly more options for integrating proven, successful, and interoperable technologies into their Expanse platform. The Alliance now includes over 40 members with more than 50 solutions — and we’ve onboarded over a dozen consulting firms. This pace of growth is a sign of a strong community of partners confident in MEDITECH’s future and the power of the Expanse platform. 

Greenfield Workspace

Participation in our Greenfield Workspace app testing environment has also shot up dramatically, with more vendors than ever testing their integration with Expanse. More than 350 vendors have been onboarded to the Workspace during 2024 — the most for any single year so far — representing a growth rate of 25%. This increase means a greater selection of proven, compatible solutions that healthcare organizations can easily implement, supporting better patient care.

Cancer Moonshot Initiative

We began our work as an early stakeholder in the Cancer Moonshot initiative. While we announced our participation in December of 2023, the project accelerated over the course of 2024 and we recently completed development of our FHIR APIs for Enhancing Oncology Models (EOM) submission — a set of standardized data elements specifically designed to streamline oncology reporting. 

And these were just the highlights. Our engagement and leadership across a wide range of industry workgroups continued, through activities like HL7 FHIR Connectathons, FHIR infrastructure development through the FAST workgroup, US Core testing with the Argonaut team, and testing of Da Vinci burden reduction Implementation Guides.

The Road Ahead

Looking forward, 2025 is on track to be the most impactful year in history for healthcare interoperability — not just for MEDITECH, but for the entire industry. We’re excited by the positive reception for Traverse Exchange and the rapid growth it's experiencing and we remain committed to the original vision of TEFCA — breaking down healthcare barriers with secure and seamless data exchange, regardless of where the data is sourced. We’re confident that TEFCA will continue to advance and QHINs will connect more and more organizations to an infrastructure built for advanced data sharing. And we’re even more confident that MEDITECH and our customers will be exceptionally well positioned to make the use of interoperable data a standard part of the delivery of care.

Please join us on February 11th to learn more about how we’re preparing our customers for TEFCA and the future of healthcare data exchange.