Bridging the Gap for Rural Healthcare
Since opening our doors in 1960, Pella Regional Health Center has grown from a single facility with seven doctors and 17 employees into a comprehensive, private, nonprofit healthcare system serving south central Iowa with 1,100 employees and over 230 affiliated physicians. Operating as a Critical Access Hospital with numerous primary care and regional medical clinics, our mission remains clear: to provide compassionate healthcare and healing services to communities across south-central Iowa.
As a rural hospital, we regularly see patients who also receive specialized care at larger, tertiary care centers. To make care as seamless as possible for our patients, we continually look for ways to improve our connections with larger health systems while maintaining our independence. MEDITECH’s Traverse Exchange interoperability solution has been a major step forward in these efforts, empowering our facility to break down data silos, access real-time clinical insights, and ultimately improve the care we provide to our community.
Implementing Seamlessly and Easily
The technical implementation represented the easiest deployment we have ever experienced, because MEDITECH handled the heavy lifting. Interoperability and data exchange often proved unpredictable in the past, but with Traverse Exchange, we get exactly what we need. The tool functions as a purely supplemental asset, meaning it fits smoothly into existing workflows, helping them run more efficiently and effectively. It was very important to us that our providers not have to change their daily routines, and we’ve been able to make sure that’s the case.
Delivering Real-Time Data Across the Hospital
Traverse Exchange instantly pulls comprehensive patient records — including progress notes, procedures, phone calls, imaging, and more — from other health systems straight to my monitor. The application places this information directly into an intuitive, consolidated patient summary. In my experience, I’ve been impressed at how well-organized and easy-to-use the summary is. I particularly love the “Human Graph” feature, which visualizes available external lab results alongside height, weight, medications, encounters over time, and more.
It’s true that in healthcare, the pace of progress means that our ability to handle the data we receive must continually improve. In that light, Traverse Exchange completely outperforms our previous interoperability platforms because it organizes data in a logical, physician-friendly way.
Our success with Traverse Exchange spans the entire hospital. For example, our pharmacists read external discharge summaries to grasp the specific reasoning behind a patient's medication changes, yielding insights that allow them to reconcile medications accurately and confidently. Our surgical nurses and emergency room staff rely heavily on the system to care for our community.
Impacting Patient Care
I recently saw a patient who arrived for a follow-up after a cardiac catheterization at the Mayo Clinic. While my nurse tried to call Mayo for records, I clicked the Traverse Exchange button and instantly retrieved the report and discharge instructions. This immediate retrieval saved us valuable time.
In another instance, a heart failure patient drove to my clinic on his way home to Missouri right after he got an echocardiogram in Des Moines. I retrieved his ejection fraction results just an hour after his test. This rapid access provided the anxious patient and his wife with immediate peace of mind before they drove the rest of the way home.
We also utilize this tool to reduce duplicate test orders. Avoiding redundant testing saves our patients money, reduces unnecessary stress, and significantly improves patients’ overall satisfaction with the care they receive from us.
Building the Future of Interoperability
Traverse Exchange is successfully connecting more and more rural and independent hospitals like ours to major health networks, providing them with the data they need to make timely, informed decisions. It’s also proving that healthcare organizations in smaller communities do not need to merge with larger systems simply to have the data they need to provide comprehensive care. The benefits of advanced interoperability are clear: improved clinical quality, patient safety, clinician burden, patient satisfaction, and many others.
But we only reap these benefits if the data is organized and presented intuitively, like Traverse Exchange does. In the not-too-distant future I think we’ll wonder how we ever made clinical decisions without checking first for all available data on our patients.
Rural healthcare organizations face intense financial pressure. In this eBook, learn more about these challenges and MEDITECH's commitment to helping organizations remain independent and community-owned, avoiding forced mergers and consolidations.
