Steve McDonald, MEDITECH Practice Lead, Nordic Global
February 2024
Abstract
As hospitals struggle to adapt to post-pandemic operating pressures, MEDITECH Expanse offers a compelling mix of tried-and-true functionality and versatility with forward-thinking innovation. MEDITECH has optionally made Expanse available as a cloud solution, thanks to its integration with Google Cloud, and its partnering with a number of other vendors to safely infuse the platform with powerful artificial intelligence tools that simplify complex clinical workflows and save you time and money at a time of chronic labor shortages and high costs.
MEDITECH has a 55-year track record of demonstrating results while taking a careful approach to new technologies. Today, the company is laser-focused on finding ways to help its users adapt to the needs to do more with less, improve the patient experience, incorporate telehealth and other digital health trends, and pivot to new value-based payment models. Often mistakenly thought of as a closed and proprietary system, MEDITECH Expanse, in reality, represents incredible versatility, utility, and value for discerning hospital executives who are focused on executing their strategic plans.
Introduction
Hospital leaders today are all too familiar with the extreme pressures under which they operate. Margins are razor thin, if not negative. Costs are high, reimbursement is not keeping pace and payment models are shifting. Staffing is a major ongoing challenge, exacerbated by burnout and the pandemic.
In this post-pandemic environment, you must strive for a delicate balance: Be efficient and spend money wisely while maintaining a focus on high-quality patient care and giving your teams the tools they need to do their jobs.
New advances in technology give you the best opportunity to get in front of these trends and transform your hospital operations. It’s why you should give MEDITECH and its Expanse platform serious consideration.
For 55 years, MEDITECH has been the mainstay in the ever-changing healthcare industry, delivering on its promises and delivering tremendous value. Today, there’s not another EHR vendor better positioned to help providers meet the daunting challenges they face.
As MEDITECH has transformed itself, hospitals are lucky to have an innovative partner solely focused on your needs, unique workflows and expertise.
Mastery and Innovation in EHRs
Today, electronic health records are often viewed as a commodity – a means to document care, capture charges and deliver a bill. Yet that’s hardly as simple as it sounds. The field of healthcare, with its unique demands, silos of unstructured data, and privacy and security considerations, has stymied tech titans including General Electric, IBM, Siemens and McDonnell Douglas, all of which have tried and largely failed to develop enterprise EHR solutions over the past half century.
Only a handful of companies dedicated to fully digitizing and connecting healthcare through enterprise software have survived and thrived, continuing to deliver value as the industry has undergone seismic change. MEDITECH, an industry pioneer that traces its roots to the late 1960s, has mastered the incredibly complicated functional demands of EHR systems in acute care, nursing home, physician office, and home health settings, and it hasn’t stopped there. And now, MEDITECH is better positioned than ever before to assist hospitals and IDNs of all sizes to tackle the daunting post-pandemic demands confronting the industry:
- Doing more with less
- The emergence of consumerism and digital health
- Adapting to value-based care
While MEDITECH has developed a reputation in some quarters (especially academia) as being a closed, proprietary system best suited for smaller community hospitals, nothing could be further from the truth. The successful 2018 release of Expanse, its web-based, fully integrated EHR platform, illustrates how the company has listened to the demands of the marketplace and delivered solutions that are both innovative and pragmatic.
MEDITECH is helping hospitals like yours solve some of their biggest challenges – including adapting to value-based payment models, becoming more consumer-friendly organizations, incorporating novel new technologies, and remaining secure and compliant – so you can focus on your mission and generate an adequate financial margin.
MEDITECH is walking the talk of innovation on several fronts:
Clinical Interoperability
With its Expanse Traverse solution, MEDITECH is advancing technological interoperability for clinicians and patients alike. MEDITECH is a member of the CommonWell Health Alliance, one of the federally recognized Qualified Health Information Networks (QHIN) that will make up the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA), a federally mandated interoperability framework that went live at the end of 2023.
That means physicians can use Expanse Traverse to get secure, up-to-date information about their patients and their medical history, even from competing major EHR systems, ensuring continuity in care and advancing the aims of value-based care. It also gives patients the ability to
view their own medical records through access to a secure patient portal, regardless of where the care took place.
In addition, MEDITECH told Becker’s it plans to work with MEDITECH Alliance and Greenfield Workspace programs to use the Expanse platform as an “ecosystem of innovation” through open APIs, which will allow connections to partnering organizations’ interoperability solutions and software applications.
Cloud-based EHR
With Expanse, MEDITECH is the rare EHR vendor with a cloud-based enterprise solution. Expanse brings operational efficiencies across all care settings, scalability and functionality, enabling you to execute on your strategic growth plans and keeping more patients in your health system’s network, thanks to the integrated system.
MEDITECH has partnered with Google Cloud to offer a Cloud Platform version of Expanse. This allows organizations to easily add multiple specialties, connect remote sites, protect patient data and ensure access to medical records during unplanned downtimes.
It also brings secure, flexible services including:
- Patient-friendly communication channels including text, email or phone
- A patient portal
- Expanse Virtual Care telehealth platform
- Expanse NOW, which allows physicians to manage routine tasks and coordinate care remotely, helping them be more productive
- Expanse Cam, a photo app that lets physicians upload photos taken from their devices directly into the patient’s chart
- Integration with Health Records, the iPhone-based Apple Health app
Taken in whole, it represents patient engagement at scale, helping hospitals compete more effectively against retail giants offering convenience-care solutions like CVS, Amazon, and Walmart with condensed implementation plans and standard content.
Artificial Intelligence
As a discerning healthcare executive, you understandably have concerns about unleashing a technology like AI in your hospital, where its utility and safety of use are largely unproven. That’s why you should feel confident when a company like MEDITECH incorporates AI into its platform.
Thanks to a number of forward-looking partnerships, MEDITECH Expanse arguably leads the field in incorporating artificial intelligence into clinical workflows.
MEDITECH has always taken a careful, conservative approach to rolling out new features and technologies, carefully validating new functionalities before releasing them and avoiding boastful hyperbole. Its approach to AI is no different. The company says that the use of AI withinan EHR “should safely enhance the experience for patients, care teams, and health systems. We also believe that AI should support – not replace – the complex work being done every day by healthcare workers.”
Among the innovative new AI use cases available with Expanse:
- Ambient Listening – Leveraging technology from Suki, Expanse functions much like an Alexa or Siri home assistant, passively listening during patient visits and compiling care notes, allowing doctors to focus less on note-taking and more on the patient, improving productivity and lending a boost to high-quality patient care.
- Shift Transitions – Nurses can use Expanse’s generative AI tools to review patient history information more quickly during shift changes, transitions to new care settings, rounding and preparing for appointments, saving valuable time. This capability is already in use by HCA Healthcare, one of MEDITECH’s largest customers.
- Discharge Summaries – Fraser Health Authority in British Columbia announced plans recently to deploy Vertex AI, a Google Cloud generative AI solution, and large language models built into Expanse to help with clinical documentation for use in discharge summaries. Fraser is using Vertex to automatically produce the first draft summarizing the patient’s hospitalization, which is then integrated within the discharge workflow in Expanse for clinicians to review and edit. It’s another huge time saver.
- Google Search and Summary – Expanse Virtual Assistant uses conversational AI to streamline chart navigation. It allows physicians to locate key information more quickly from Expanse, legacy MEDITECH platforms or scanned documents, saving valuable time.
- Virtual Assistant – This solution uses Nuance speech recognition to enable physicians to place orders via verbal commands and retrieve needed information including lab results, medications, allergies, and radiology images and present it at the point of care from a mobile device. This saves providers time and allows them to pay attention to patients rather than a computer screen.
MEDITECH’s no-nonsense reputation means that if they say something about AI, they are delivering, and the technology works as advertised. This is not a company prone to boasting, especially about things that aren’t ready for prime time.
As you wrestle with financial margins, clinical staff efficiency, care quality and improving the patient experience, the use cases for Expanse AI are virtually unlimited. And as AI technology evolves, we can expect more novel use cases, thanks to a solid Expanse platform, MEDITECH’s innovative culture and a history of delivering on its promises.
Other Novel Use Cases
Beyond the promise of AI, Expanse offers incredible utility in tackling strategic issues important to you – improving clinical quality, revenue integrity and ensuring efficiency in all operations at a time of constrained resources.
Early Detection of Disease
Sioux Falls, S.D.-based Avera Health had a system-wide goal of reducing sepsis mortality and created a toolkit in Expanse to standardize certain protocols, tools and processes and more quickly identify patients at risk for the condition. It realized a 45% reduction in sepsis mortality and saved $10 million.
Population Health
Expanse’s Population Health Management platform includes patient registries fed by disparate data and claims that flag common gaps in care and social determinants of health, so your providers can be proactive about addressing issues before appointments. That’s key to adjusting to value-based payment models.
Revenue Cycle Management
Expanse Revenue Cycle offers help with everything from patient scheduling and preregistration to claims submission, denials management and payment collection. The solution enabled Oswego Health in New York to eliminate manual processes at a time of reduced staffing levels to monitor the revenue cycle and identify issues. The automation helped the health system keep accounts receivable days between 30-35 days.
Enterprise Resource Planning
Unlike its biggest two rivals, MEDITECH offers an ERP that is fully integrated with Expanse. Business Clinical Analytics fuses clinical and operational data with financial information including general ledger, payroll, supply chain management, revenue cycle and service line analytics, offering flexibilities to conduct self-service analytics through customizable dashboards. Plus, it features a comprehensive revenue cycle to handle everything from patient scheduling, preregistration and increasing clinic volumes to claims submission, denials management and payment collection.
Cost-Effective Performance
As an executive tasked with delivering results and staying within budget, MEDITECH offers compelling value, with cost-effective performance that is second to none.
MEDITECH says 85% of its customers have been with the company for 10 years or more, thanks to both its cost-effectiveness and its performance, which has been consistently recognized by KLAS Research (it won Best in KLAS for the ninth consecutive year in 2023). The company has many clients that have been with it for more than 30 years.
According to a Scottsdale Institute study from fiscal years 2018-2022, MEDITECH had the lowest average IT expenses and lowest percentage of IT FTEs as a percentage of the total organizational full-time staff, compared to its closest competitors. MEDITECH also was lowest in terms of both
average IT expense per organization FTEs and average IT expense per staffed bed, illustrating its relative ease of use.
Conclusion
The world is changing rapidly, and healthcare is no exception. Artificial intelligence, consumerism and digital health have arrived, and interoperability and value-based payments are knocking at the door. Is your EHR vendor rolling with the changes?
You’re looking for demonstrated ROI from your EHR, and MEDITECH is poised to deliver. With its integrations with Google Cloud and Apple Health, its advances in data interoperability, its incorporation of AI to simply complex clinical workflows and its many versatile and useful applications, MEDITECH has provided an array of innovative new tools to its dependable, tried and true core functionality.
Users can expect much more to come. In 2024, MEDITECH has said it plans to unveil an Expanse Pathology solution, integrate ambient listening across all clinician interfaces, roll out expanded mental health solutions and new AI integrations, and move its patient portal to the cloud. It recently announced it was joining the Cancer Moonshot, the Biden administration initiative to cut the cancer death rate in half over the next 25 years.
It makes Expanse an excellent choice for future-proofing your hospital operations.
If you’re already on MEDITECH, stay with MEDITECH and upgrade to Expanse.
If you’re not already running MEDITECH, you owe it to yourself to have a look at MEDITECH, which is cost effective to own and operate and brings a solid platform, is efficient in its performance and delivers as advertised. It offers health systems many tools to help them ensure revenue integrity and transition to value-based or other bundled payment models, helping them navigate more confidently in healthcare’s ever-challenging new normal.
Author
Steve McDonald
MEDITECH Practice Lead
Nordic Global