An Idaho health system decided to stick with Meditech as its EHR vendor despite exploring other options.
What Cottonwood- and Orofino-based St. Mary’s Health and Clearwater Valley Health knew was that they needed a new EHR — and quickly. The facilities have been on Meditech’s old EHR, Magic, for inpatient and Centricity for ambulatory care for nearly 20 years, and still rely heavily on fax machines.
“One of our main goals in upgrading was to get on one platform, so it’s one chart, no matter where the patient is in the system, which is going to be a huge improvement for us,” Lenne Bonner, CEO of St. Mary’s Health and Clearwater Valley Health, told Becker’s.
The two critical access hospitals plan to go live with Meditech Expanse the first week of August. The implementation will take about nine months. About 50 of the hospitals’ 450 employees have been working on the project.
“Pharmacy was very heavily resource-required, and lab has been pretty resource-intensive as well. But the other [departments] have been manageable,” Ms. Bonner said. “We also have three or four super-user physicians who have been really engaged in the process and helping us out.”
St. Mary’s and Clearwater Valley initially planned to switch to Epic, which their parent health system, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho-based Kootenai Health, obtains from Tacoma, Wash.-based MultiCare Health System. But St. Mary’s and Clearwater Valley’s move to Epic got disrupted by the pandemic and became unaffordable. The hospitals also had to meet Medicare-based interoperability standards, so they couldn’t wait any longer.
The Meditech implementation cost less than $500,000, and the system will pay a monthly subscription fee. Epic’s price tag would have been in the millions.
“At first, it was a frustration, especially from our physicians, who were excited to be on Epic, and they kind of felt like it was a promise undelivered,” Ms. Bonner said. “But as we got through the demos, and saw more of what [Meditech Expanse] could do, it was a pretty quick turnaround for people’s excitement about it and realizing it’s probably a better solution for small hospitals than something like Epic.”
The two hospitals still need to determine how they’ll share data with many of their specialty referral partners, who are on Epic, though Meditech offers an interoperability network called Traverse Exchange. St. Mary’s and Clearwater Valley currently fax medical records back and forth with their corporate health system.
“The patient portal is so much easier, the online bill pay. There are just so many advancements in the technology that I think we’re going to be way better off,” Ms. Bonner said.
She also cited improved documentation and coding for value-based care, self-scheduling for patients, and better patient safety from being on one record. The two hospitals have been piloting Ambience AI scribes but may eventually move to an ambient listening platform that interfaces with Meditech.
The cloud-based Meditech-as-a-service platform is mostly prebuilt, but Ms. Bonner said the hospitals have been customizing more than they expected.
Ms. Bonner said the implementation has been “pretty smooth” though there have been bumps along the way, either due to turnover at Meditech or the hospital’s project manager leaving about a month into the project. But St. Mary’s and Clearwater Valley worked with Meditech to find the right employees for the right assignments and outsourced a full-time project manager.
One thing that hasn’t been difficult is selling staffers on the change, Ms. Bonner said.
“I know a lot of times it’s hard to even get providers and physicians open to changing EMRs — I did not struggle with that at all,” she said. “They’ve been begging me for five years to get a new EMR. It was just a matter of making sure we were comfortable with the choice that we made, which, once they got over the idea of not being on Epic, was a clear frontrunner for us.”
