Key Takeaways from MEDITECH’s Physician and CIO Forum 2018:

• MEDITECH is moving its customer base to Expanse, the latest iteration of their EHR
• Expanse has significant inducements for hospitals seeking to support value-based care and be more interoperable

Photo: Courtesy of MEDITECH

Last week, we had a chance to attend MEDITECH’s Physician and CIO Forum, an event the company uses to give its customer executives a look forward.

The more concrete developments described over the course of this two-day event include:

Voice Support

A lot of attendees were talking about a new capability planned for Expanse called the Virtual Assistant. The idea is to voice-enable aspects of the physician’s workflow. Even as MEDITECH, and all the other major EHR vendors, slowly improve the interface design of their EHRs, users still want fewer clicks and swipes and less data entry. MEDITECH, seeing the rapid adoption of voice in consumer markets, wants its users to be able to retrieve results or review charts hands-free. It indicated that it is experimenting with this Nuance-sourced technology at a customer site with a phased roll-out planned once it gains more experience. Sometime next year it will begin work on using voice in physician documentation as well.

Interoperability and FHIR

MEDITECH came out strongly in support of FHIR. It has three live customers who have implemented FHIR servers that support REST-style access. MEDITECH facilities will soon be able to offer FHIR-based access on the CommonWell network. It is also looking at more complex transactions from Project Argonaut to support patient questionnaires and scheduling that will rely on write access to MEDITECH EHRs. You can read our full analysis of their support for API access in the MEDITECH profile in our App Store report.

Mobile developers will soon have access to a new capability called MEDITECH Greenfield to develop patient- or clinician-facing apps. It will serve up a set of APIs based on MU’s common clinical dataset with plans to add other data types down the road.

Clinical Decision Support

MEDITECH will rely on CDS Hooks to offer Stanson Health’s content for a variety of purposes. It will be used to push some of the most common care gap alerts. It will also push recommendations to physicians based on the Choosing Wisely campaign.

MEDITECH’s approach to introducing new functionality allows its customer to keep the lights on and support the onrushing changes to U.S. healthcare.

Population Health Management

MEDITECH’s PHM story is a little clearer than it was this time last year. The company’s collaboration with Arcadia.io means that its customers will soon have access to an aggregated patient record of MEDITECH and non-MEDITECH EHRs married to paid claims. Customers will get access to a new suite of dashboards and reports that provide risk scores, care gaps, attribution, utilization, and costs on a per patient or per cohort basis. The company plans to roll this out to early adopters before the middle of next year.

Patient Engagement

The company talked a lot about its new downloadable app for patients: MHealth. This app will permit patients to manage a lot of administrative and payment tasks in connections with office visits. It also will offer questionnaires that will help with reconciling meds and allergies to the clinical record in the EHR.

Upshot

MEDITECH hospitals are under the same pressures to adapt to value-based care that the rest of the industry continues to struggle with. Many of the company’s actions over the next year will help them in different ways. MEDITECH’s approach to introducing new functionality allows its customers to keep the lights on and broadly support the onrushing changes to U.S. healthcare.