Currently, one of the most important goals in the health IT industry is making data truly interoperable.

In pursuit of that goal, healthcare organizations are seeking ways to match patient data and locate records in a fragmented digital environment where technology and processes simply aren’t set up to allow efficient data exchange and access. On top of that, regulatory requirements are putting additional pressure on healthcare organizations to meet benchmarks and reporting mandates.

Interoperability has always been a cornerstone of MEDITECH’s vision for healthcare IT. And through our partnership with CommonWell Health Alliance®, we’re pleased to be taking another large step for connectivity, by successfully deploying CommonWell interoperability services at Alliance Community Hospital (ACH) in Alliance, Ohio.

The challenges faced by rural healthcare organizations today — Critical Access Hospitals in particular — are truly daunting. Many never fully recovered from the economic downturn and most continue to experience provider shortages while caring for an increasingly older and more chronically ill population.

Healthcare IT should always be about the patient. To that end, interoperability is the cornerstone of this patient-first perspective — as an important support mechanism for the timely and effective exchange of information critical for delivering patient care.

As most of us in healthcare know, interoperability is not quite where it needs to be for our patients. While technology can make everyday life much more agile, sometimes it seems like IT is leaving the patient experience behind.

A hot topic of conversation in the last few months has been the Annals of Family Medicine study observing that primary care physicians spend an average of 86 minutes of “pajama time” each night catching up on work from the day.

This study was co-written by researchers from the AMA, which brought to mind their 8 EHR Usability Principles that were published in 2014. At the time these principles were published, MEDITECH was delivering Expanse to our first early adopters, having had the foresight to see what was coming and redesign our software at a time when others were continuing to just add functionality on top of existing workflows.

For the third year in a row, MEDITECH proudly hosted the CommonWell Health Alliance Annual General Meeting and Fall Summit last week at our Joanne Wood Conference Center in Foxborough, Massachusetts. The annual Member gathering provides a valuable opportunity to gather and reflect on the many achievements the Alliance and its members have attained throughout the year.

Picture this. It’s 3am. A patient comes into your ER unconscious after a car accident just down the road. The patient has never been in your facility before so you don’t know the status of their medications, allergies, or any medical history. I think we can all agree, this makes it challenging to provide the safest, most accurate care.

My journey to becoming an e-Patient activist for facial differences and antibiotic resistance started in 2004, when a car accident in South Africa left me with severe abdominal and facial injuries.

Through multiple surgeries and consultations with doctors, I became aware of the lack of online resources in health, and began working to address that. I was a marketing and design professional for 18 years, enabling me to audit the web and discover that many healthcare professionals [HCPs] didn’t have websites, which was why it was so difficult to find them.