It’s that time again! For months now, we’ve been planning all the great ways we can meet up with the MEDITECH community at HIMSS. We’re making change—one provider and one patient at a time. At HIMSS20, we’ll be sharing all the innovative ways MEDITECH is driving the next generation of healthcare.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

I took over as president about six months ago. I was previously chief operating officer over operations and primarily development. I am now being reintroduced to a great leadership team that is responsible for our customer experience implementation and client services. We are re-engineering how we look at implementation to improve the physician experience and how we can improve customer experience as we continue to service them moving forward.

Reading about a hospital’s success is one thing, but hearing stories face-to-face with clinicians is something entirely different. I recently visited Halifax Health to hear how MEDITECH Expanse is helping real doctors care for real patients at this busy trauma center and health system. 

As physicians, we often don’t see the harm that opioid pain medications can cause to the individual, whether through side effects, dependence, or diversion. Also, we may not always consider the implications on the national scale; prescription drug overdose deaths have increased exponentially from 2013 to 2016. The magnitude of this crisis has led to pain management guidelines from numerous entities, such as the Joint Commission and the CDC. These recommendations provide a solid foundation for opioid stewardship and are now considered to be best practice.  

National Recovery Month  sponsored by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), is observed every September to educate Americans that substance use treatment and mental health services can enable those with mental and substance use disorders to live healthy, rewarding lives.

The rapid pace of change in healthcare today doesn’t just necessitate better technologies to keep pace; it also requires better communication. Whether it involves conversations between patients and physicians, handoffs between clinicians of different specialties, interoperable data exchange, or even the ability of care organizations to connect with their IT vendors - clear communication is often what makes the difference between a good outcome, and a poorer one.

In our latest thought leader podcast, I spoke with Jim Fitzgerald, executive vice president and chief strategy officer at CloudWave about the role of cloud computing in healthcare.

The following article appeared in the May 23, 2019 issue of the HIMSS Clinical Informatics Insights newsletter. A portion of it has been posted here with permission.

Last year, a colleague of mine wrote an apology to clinicians on behalf of all EHR vendors for the pain we’ve put them through. It resonated with many readers, who have soured on the overly hopeful messages of clinical and business transformation coming from the industry. It’s important for all of us to honestly acknowledge where we are, how we got here, and what we need to do to restore the confidence of EHR users — particularly clinicians, whose lives have been irrevocably changed, for better and for worse, by the computerization of healthcare.

No healthcare organization should ever have to choose between innovation and value. As our industry continues to transform, it will be important to both adopt new technologies that can meet the needs of demanding consumers, and still prioritize ROI and long-term sustainability while doing so.

Moving to a new EHR platform can seem like a daunting task, with the clinical and technological changes that it requires.

In these videos, MEDITECH customer executives discuss how their hospitals successfully navigated the journey to Expanse, and the difference it’s made in how they practice medicine.