As a product manager working to advance MEDITECH's interoperability efforts, my days are typically filled with balancing the excitement of innovation and the responsibility of positively impacting patient lives. Putting aside that I am a patient myself, as we all are, it can be difficult to know the real impact a solution has on patients across various care settings.
At MEDITECH, we don’t often have opportunities to meet with patients directly ourselves. That’s understandable, considering the imperative of patient privacy and confidentiality. But we do hear about the meaningful impact of our work on patients through our conversations with physicians, nurses, and other front line providers using our software. And nothing is more gratifying than hearing from a clinician that one of our solutions is having a profoundly positive impact on their patients.
That’s what has made the past few weeks so rewarding. I recently had the opportunity to visit several healthcare systems using a powerful new tool that brings utility to external data found across our national data exchange network, Traverse Exchange — and witness firsthand how it’s beginning to change the way clinicians interact with data. Even more moving were the stories they shared about patients whose lives were impacted for the better as the result of this new tool.
Over the past two years I’ve had the privilege of working on the new Consolidated Patient Summary we’ve added to our Traverse Exchange interoperability solution. The name, while accurate, belies the remarkable power of this tool, which solves many of the problems clinicians have historically faced attempting to access, view, and use data about their patients from sources outside of their EHR. The consolidated patient summary provides a new way to handle external data that no longer relies on clinicians reviewing hundreds of pages of obsolete data buried in documents from other organizations — a process so cumbersome that many clinicians simply gave up on even attempting to use data from outside their EHR.
I remember the first time I saw Traverse Exchange parse a dozen test files with mock patient data from different organizations, sort that data into meaningful categories (encounters, medications, allergies, etc.), deduplicate it, and display it on one screen. After nearly a decade of working with health systems to optimize their use of external data, it was exhilarating to see this new tool in action and recognize the impact it would have in alleviating so many of the burdens clinicians face. Clinicians who see it for the first time immediately grasp its power — and those using it are beginning to share some remarkable stories.
Here are just a few:
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“An Indispensable Tool” An ED physician at one of our sites in Iowa recently said he didn’t know how he could do his job if the Consolidated Patient Summary were taken away. It’s become indispensable and a standard part of his workflow. For every new patient who presents in the ED, the first step is to check Traverse Exchange to see if there’s any data from nearby organizations using other EHRs. Since his organization operates in a competitive local market, there’s often important information for patients who have been seen at another facility using a different system. This is precisely why interoperability is so important. He and his colleagues now feel that it’s critical to his patients’ safety to always check for interoperable data — and the summary screen makes it quick and easy. |
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A physician assistant at a hospital in California told me she was able to help a patient re-enroll for SSI in minutes rather than hours. This patient needed a letter from a clinician to apply for SSI disability, along with copious amounts of supporting documentation. Using Traverse Exchange, the PA was able to write the letter and collect the documentation on the spot with her patient in the room. The patient had been admitted to another hospital a few months prior, and using Traverse Exchange she was able to locate the imaging, labs and consults from that visit to draft the letter and supporting documentation. In her words, it was “a real time saver” and it resulted in an extremely grateful patient. |
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A medical director in Maryland reported that he understood instantly what he was seeing and required no training. "I had a situation recently where I needed to know whether my patient had a particular test completed at another organization. Without any training on Traverse Exchange, I was able to launch the tool and find the information I needed in seconds. It was remarkably quick and easy." He even remarked that it’s more intuitive than any other vendor’s approach he’s seen, and he has worked at organizations using every leading EHR system. |
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But there’s one specific observation from a clinician that has stuck with me. She told me how exhausting it can be to manage patient data all day, every day, from so many sources. “We don’t want to be data managers; we just want to take care of patients,” she told me. She said that the consolidated patient summary is allowing her to return her focus to delivering patient care. I think about that comment every day and use it as motivation to continue to evolve Traverse Exchange. |
But even more important than the positive impact of Traverse Exchange and the consolidated patient summary on clinicians is the impact on patients: The patient brought to the ED whose physician quickly discovers a piece of information from another organization that enables a life-saving care decision. The patient whose SSI disability application is filed in time for them to receive an important time-sensitive treatment. The patient who can’t recall their lengthy list of medications, whose clinicians can quickly and easily find it and avoid an adverse drug interaction.
The positive impact on clinicians is just the beginning. There’s a paradigm shift underway that’s finally dislodging patient data from siloed systems and putting it back where it belongs: In the hands of patients. We’re on a mission to empower patients to become the orchestrators of their own care. That could simply mean providing deeper insights into their conditions, or providing transparency around who is asking for their data, for what purpose, and whether or not that information should be shared. Traverse Exchange is starting to do that by making their data available to them through the TEFCA-enabled health apps they use.
But technology alone is not enough. The success of interoperability also relies on trust, usability, and continued collaboration across the healthcare ecosystem. When health data is accessible, understandable, and securely shared, patients are better positioned to advocate for themselves and achieve better outcomes.
I am humbled by how far we’ve come and even more excited for what comes next.