Electronic health records company Meditech was there at the dawn of what was then called the computerized patient record.
While at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1964, A. Neil Pappalardo developed the MUMPS (MGH Utility Multi-Programming System) language that still underpins some of the technology in current EHRs. Pappalardo started Meditech in 1969 — a decade before Epic Systems and Cerner came about — and he still serves as chairman.
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But Westwood, Massachusetts-based Meditech doesn’t want to be seen as a “legacy” vendor using outdated technology.
Four years ago, the company stepped outside its historical inpatient market by designing a completely Web-based ambulatory EHR, working with physicians in an Agile development process, according to Helen Waters, Meditech’s vice president of sales and marketing. That system hit the market in 2015.
Waters discussed the pivot in an interview with MedCity News. Here is an edited transcript.
MedCity News: What prompted Meditech to make such a radical shift to a Web-based EHR?
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Waters: That was a pretty big move for us. We previously had never built an office- or clinic-based system. We had some partnerships that we went forward with, but this is a truly new design for the post-Meaningful Use era.
To some extent, we applaud the emphasis on quality and on outcomes [in Meaningful Use], given the fact that we all consume healthcare. But in the journey to get here, we’ve made the process of practicing medicine and caring for patients perhaps more complicated and complex around the EHR space.
About four years ago, we saw a tremendous opportunity to start to envision the future of this industry and our company, which is where we set forth to realize that the emphasis on ambulatory would significantly continue, that we needed to expand the platform to include an integrated ambulatory system so we wouldn’t just copycat, quite honestly, what was out there from the many providers in that space, from Epic to Practice Partner, which [McKesson] bought, to Athena and others. We were going to try to create something dramatically different.
MedCity News: Did you build that from the ground up so it’s not based on MUMPS or anything like that?
Waters: Truly Web-based, It’s browser-agnostic. It’s written at the level of HTML5 with all standardized tools, so we can run on an iPad or an Android device or a Surface tablet. It’s got all the conventions that physicians expect to use in every other part of their lives, and we brought all of that capacity to the electronic health records so they can order, they can document, they can review, they can e-prescribe, they can discharge all through browser-based access to a fully Web-based tool.
So they’re tapping and swiping in this environment. They’re no longer clicking and scrolling and onerously pecking their way through medical records.
MedCity News: Are you changing the way that you design updates to your core, historical inpatient system?
Waters: Yeah. So we introduced what I just mentioned on the Web on the ambulatory side first, and now we have brought that same convention of use, of tapping and swiping, in mobile technology into the acute inpatient side for hospitalist and specialists, and also into the emergency department. So the user interface, regardless of where they’re practicing, whether it’s from their office or they’re in the facility navigating seeing patients or the emergency department, [it’s] all the same mobile environment.
MedCity News: You’ve redesigned the user interface even for the legacy system?
Waters: Correct. In this case, the tools that I’m talking about, none of them are legacy. We’ve completely rewritten the physician experience, from ordering to documentating to reviewing to e-prescribing. The database is legacy in terms of where it’s filing and what it’s doing. But the actual application environment is completely new and Web-based.
Photo: Twitter user MEDITECH
