January 9, 2012
Posted by: Tara Marchi
Achieving meaningful use in MEDITECH HIT environments brings some special challenges – technical, financial and cultural. While overcoming these challenges requires a lot of hard work, focus and specific expertise, organizations that take a smart approach to meaningful use (and other major initiatives like 6.0 migration, HIERHIO connectivity, and provider office integration) can not only achieve success for the immediate goal, but can also set the stage for long term benefits including significant cost savings and streamlined integration projects going forward.
Technically, the MEDITECH platform presents a number of challenges for organizations seeking to implement an EHR and demonstrate meaningful use. Most of these boil down to the difficulty and expense associated with establishing one- or two-way data sharing among MEDITECH, the EHR and the other clinical and financial systems in the organization that need to be integrated to achieve meaningful use.
The financial challenge – above and beyond the time and expense associated with implementing integrations among systems – is that organizations must purchase each MEDITECH interface with another system and pay annual maintenance fees. Those incentive payments are nice, but between the EHR itself and all of the interface costs alone, no one is making a profit on meaningful use.
The good news is that interface engine solutions that replace many point-to-point integrations with a single one-to-many connection can eliminate those interface fees, save a lot of time and effort in integration work and ongoing management, and make every future integration initiative a much more time- and cost-effective proposition.
We have worked with many organizations – see our case study from Olympic Medical Center – to save big bucks on interface costs while streamlining integration efforts with Summit Express Connect. Do you have an interface engine success story? We would love hear it.
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