By John McCann, Director of Marketing, BridgeHead Software
BridgeHead Software once again was proud to participate in last month’s International MUSE Conference – the premier source for networking, educating and professional development for MEDITECH users. As a closely-allied partner, BridgeHead has complemented MEDITECH solutions with backup, disaster recovery and archiving functionality for over 16 years, so these events provide us with the opportunity to meet face-to-face with our long-standing customers as well as hospitals new to the community.
The event was a tremendous success for BridgeHead, as we met with nearly half of the 146 hospitals in attendance. During these discussions, we kept our focus on understanding their specific challenges and discussing how their MEDITECH EMR does not always contain all of the patient information a hospital’s staff needs, when they need it, such as medical images, long-term mental health information, chronic disease history, scanned records, and data that is locked in (legacy) departmental applications. That’s where BridgeHead Software’s Independent Clinical Archive (ICA), HealthStore®, can make a real difference.
MEDITECH and BridgeHead – a Powerful Combination
HealthStore, often referred to as a next generation vendor neutral archive (VNA) offers a standards-based repository for all of a hospital’s patient information (current and historic) that is typically unavailable through an EMR. As HealthStore integrates directly with the MEDITECH EMR, this powerful combination offers users a complete, 360-degree patient view, all accessible from one application. HealthStore has a wide range of benefits to clinicians, health information managers, and support staff – from quick and easy access to the full range of patient information directly from the EMR, in context, whether it’s for consulting, diagnosing and the treatment of patients, through to aggregating information for legal, compliance or governance purposes.
While connecting with so many customers at MUSE, we took the opportunity to survey those who stopped by our booth so we could 1) help attendees gain a macro view of how their hospital compared against others in attendance, and 2) learn insights to help us continually improve the features and functionality of BridgeHead’s solutions.
After compiling the survey results of the respondents, we’ve found several noteworthy facts including:
57% of the hospitals currently utilizing MEDITECH 6.0 or beyond access older versions of MEDITECH software – this leads us to believe many organizations are running both their new and old versions of their EMR in parallel. We predict this situation is likely to increase as 48% of the hospitals we surveyed are currently on much earlier versions. Of these, 76% have an intention to deploy MEDITECH 6.1.5/6.1.6, with 39% hoping to make the transition within the next 12 months
Comment: These statistics would suggest that hospitals are likely to be experiencing some challenges such as a user’s need to access multiple systems to get the patient information they require. There is also some suggestion of cost inefficiencies in the running and maintaining of ‘duplicate’ applications. If this is the case, there is a great opportunity for hospitals to rationalize their IT environments, saving money and offering staff all of the patient data they need all from the MEDITECH EMR (via BridgeHead’s HealthStore).
We also asked respondents to share what Ambulatory EMR systems were in use within their hospitals. Below are the percentages of those systems:
- 35% MEDITECH
- 14% eClinicalWorks
- 13% Athena Health
- 11% Allscripts
- 17% listed various other systems
- 15% answered that their hospitals don’t offer ambulatory EMR.
Comment: These percentages are interesting given the latest trends in the US healthcare market for hospitals to acquire ambulatory physician practices as part of their growth plans. We believe, as such acquisitions continue, that hospitals will undoubtedly inherit disparate technologies that they will somehow have to bring into the fold. Again, this presents an opportunity to ensure that data from any IT system across the healthcare economy can be standardized, protected and made available to users via the MEDITECH EMR (again, via BridgeHead’s HealthStore).
It’s clear from our time at MUSE that BridgeHead’s HealthStore® can help hospitals to bring together data from across their organization into a single, standards-based repository to allow easier access to patient information from within the MEDITECH EMR. For more details on the information gathered at MUSE or to learn more about BridgeHead’s HealthStore®, contact sales.us@bridgeheadsoftware.com or +1 (781) 939-0780.
