Four months into the job, Joel Klein, MD, executive vice president and chief digital and information officer of Edison, N.J.-based Hackensack Meridian Health, already has a packed calendar.
On the technology front, the 18-hospital network is implementing a new enterprise resource planning system, aiming to become one of Epic’s top adopters nationwide, and developing its own AI tools to prevent readmissions.
Hackensack Meridian plans to go live with Workday in the second quarter of 2027. “Those are organization-transforming projects,” Dr. Klein told Becker’s. “They touch the most sensitive nerves of any organization, so payroll, accounts payable and procurement — they have to work perfectly.”
At the same time, Hackensack Meridian plans to become one of the leading health systems for Epic adoption in the next 24 months, or, as Dr. Klein put it, continue to “put ornaments on the Epic tree.”
“We are a long-time customer, and we have really embraced, organizationally, the functionality that Epic continues to develop,” he said. “And I know that maybe sounds like, ‘Oh, great, that makes you no different than lots of other big organizations.’ But it really does take a lot of active, concentrated, dedicated energy and effort to do that, because you’re talking dozens and dozens of features that you have to review on a quarterly basis.”
The academic system already uses most of Epic’s applications — it’s looking into the EHR vendor’s Payer Platform and research capabilities — and wants to ensure it’s optimizing the ones it has. The goal is to reach a 9 or 10 (out of 10) in Epic’s Gold Stars program for feature adoption.
And it’s not about just turning the applications on. Take flowsheet macros, which automatically populate fields in the chart. “There are lots of different kinds of clinicians that can take advantage of a tool like that, but it’s both an awareness component — ‘Hey, did you know you could do this?’ — and then an appropriateness component — ‘When should you blow this in and then go back and edit it, versus don’t blow it in and just go top to bottom and document what you actually did?” Dr. Klein said.
He is also taking an open, yet skeptical, approach to AI. “We’re dialing up our scrutiny level,” he said. “We feel like part of our competitive advantage is that we’re going to start to look really critically at the actual outcome of some of these technologies before we decide where we’re going to make a full-steam-ahead, pour-gasoline-on-it kind of investment and not just ride the hype.”
With its own software development team, Hackensack Meridian has options. The health system is building tools to prepare patients for discharge and engage them afterward to keep them from returning to the hospital.
“There are a lot of hospitals out there where you are handed a huge stack of paper and invited to go figure it out,” Dr. Klein explained. “I mean, there are staff who will go through it with you and make sure that you understand what your medicines are, what your follow-up instructions are, what we don’t want you to do, when we want you to call 911, but to be honest, a lot of our patients are really overwhelmed by it. So this is another area where we want to do some work to see if we can make this easier for patients with technology.”
Hackensack Meridian is piloting a tool that has conversational AI call patients after routine medical discharges to ensure they’re complying with medications and scheduling follow-up care. The toolkit came from a vendor, while the health system handled workflow design, configuration and troubleshooting internally.
“Our patient experience team has actually found that the satisfaction scores of patients who go through this process are higher,” Dr. Klein said. “And what’s interesting is that their opinion of their hospitalization is actually better when they have a strong post-discharge experience, which we think is notable and important.”
Hackensack Meridian also has several hundred physicians using AI scribes to automatically generate clinical notes. “The jury is still out, from my point of view, on the productivity gains,” Dr. Klein said. “My working hypothesis is that there are some physicians, some providers, for whom it really does accelerate their productivity, and there are others for whom it doesn’t. And so then the game becomes: ‘How do we tailor it for the right physician, as opposed to just buying an enterprise license where everybody gets it?’ I’m not sure that’s a good use of resources. I know a lot of places are doing that because it’s a nice sound bite. The approach we’re really considering is to be a little bit more tailored.”
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