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Welcome to This Week Health. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of This Week Health, where we are dedicated to transforming healthcare, one connection at a time.

Now, onto our interview

So thank you both for being with me today. Thank you. It's

great to be here. Thank you. Yeah.

Share with us about your titles and some of the roles you're doing, and we'll jump into some of the content too.

Yeah, sure. I'm Chris Policano, sales vice president at MEDITECH. Recently promoted. I've been a meta tech now for about 36 years and have responsibility for all of our customer and business strategic relationships.

Fantastic and thank you for having me. I'm Rachel Wilkes. I'm a director of marketing and I do a lot of work with our generative AI efforts for supporting our customers and helping deploy and roll out new use cases

and your newest use case, which is the Traverse Exchange. Fantastic capability to bring so much information into the chart real time Firebase.

Thank you, by the way, because That's a big, one of the interoperability capabilities, use the newest technologies that are available. So please share with us what you've recently launched, how patients and providers are going to see this, and what that means for the future of care. Sure.

So we're building upon the foundation of what we built in Canada. So we have a Traverse Exchange connected network in Canada. We've brought that to the States. So what we're enabling is data exchange between Meditech customers. As well as to any other health system, regardless of VHR, that adheres to the appropriate interoperability standards.

our central tenet here is to be able to share this patient data regardless of the patients are receiving care. Being able to maintain the ability to stay on a Meditech system and the platform that has the full capabilities and share data with any of the referral partners. But, really, one of the most exciting aspects of this is what we've introduced in terms of the clinician workflow.

And having the data itself isn't necessarily as impactful unless you start to put utility around that data and incorporate that into the workflows too. So regardless of where that data is coming from, to see a nice kind of longitudinal summary of what's happening for the patients embedded in workflow to be able to use that for clinical decision making is really what we're most excited about and the impact that can have on patients.

And physicians must be loving this

Yeah, absolutely. The ability to incorporate the content from the interoperability model into the physician workflow is a real game changer in the context of enabling them to reduce the burden that they have in traditionally having to look at a CCD or a very large document in a PDF format that might be coming through a different interoperability methodology.

So really, what we want to do is enable an interoperability as a service type of approach, but also importantly change the dynamic around how the physician and the clinician get access to the information and can have it. presented to them in a meaningful format.

So you're starting with your Expanse customers.

So our onboarding customers are Expanse customers in the U. S. right now. So we have organizations in over 35 states.

And we're already talking about expanding this out into the UK and Ireland. So it's a growing market for us. And we know that market also demands the same sort of capability to exchange information. So we're excited for where the future will take us internationally as well.

And if I could just add, I want to come back to a point that was mentioned earlier by Rachel, we started this in Canada.

our folks out in Canada we love you and we're excited that you continue to be partners with us as we drive an innovation strategy for you.

One, I love that medicine is an equalizer. We're talking about the ability to have equity and access and that is a universal need. Being here at HIMSS, there's again, 28, 000 people are here this week, 11, 000 of them are providers.

HIMSS is booming again and people are coming from around the world to have these conversations. What are you seeing the last couple of days that has you not only just like with a fresh set of eyes, but also most excited about where we are headed as an industry.

So we've had a lot of focus on the tech equity aspect, accessibility of the technology and some work we've recently done within our portal, which we've just renamed to my health hub. it's been a big focus and obviously that the AI conversations and ambient is a big one. We've just announced some work that we're doing with Microsoft for their dragon copilot solutions were launched partner with them.

Mhm. And doing some additional work with Google as well in terms of using our tool that we have called Expanse Navigator. So we've embedded Google technology in for advanced search and summarization of the record to be able to again put together a nice view of what's happening for the patients.

So like deeply search and have a nice view by, sorted by patient conditions. So it's just the rapid advancement that we've seen of AI. The different flavors of how folks are incorporating it. These conversations about how do you really responsibly weave this into workflow. Because if our goal is to reduce burden, we need to be very careful, especially from our perspective as an EHR vendor, to do this in a meaningful and impactful way.

You're hitting all the big fours, I call it, from the conversations this week. The digital transformation, the workflow management, the AI aspect. Cyber is the fourth. Tell me a little bit about the security around your innovation.

Yeah. So we've been very aggressive in ensuring that the environment that we're operating in is secure. It is a cloud service. So a lot of the A. I. Work we're doing is part of our cloud service. We are partnered with Google Cloud Platform. G. C. P. As part of that deliverable. When you think about tier one level security.

They are bar none tops from our perception in the marketplace. So it's cloud-based. We can gain the benefit of the Google security platform around that deployment. And really, I think when we look at security, it's important to note that apart from the infrastructure environment that's being secured through that GCP cloud model, we also have our own security expertise in house at Meditech as well, that we're leveraging.

Excellent. And what I love most about Meditech having been a user for several years and in different lifetimes is the staying power of your product and how it continues to quietly be a champion for the industry and for itself. What about the culture of your organization?

And the staying power again of the people you mentioned 36 years. A lot of people from Meditech have been there a long time and that's not because the product is stale by any means. It's like all of this brain trust keeps coming together. What's some of the secret sauce that makes Meditech so continuously successful and always on?

It really starts with the culture of the company. I was probably the 378th employee. It was hired many years ago, and I've been there and over time I became incredibly passionate about our mission. So we talk a little bit about equity, health equity has been core to our mission for the history of the company.

Ultimately we create technologies that are designed to enable human interaction, not create barriers to human interaction. So you see a really significant emphasis that we've had over the last several years. around a mobility strategy. And really changing the way physicians and nurses and other allied health services in the healthcare space interact with the information so that the technology is not a barrier between them and the patients that they're providing care for.

By the way, we work in some very large, complex environments outside of the community space as well. And we've been very focused on ensuring that the same kind of technology capabilities in those large complex environments can be available to the community space.

We talk about Meditech also as the intelligent EHR platform, and I like to describe that in a few ways., As far as infrastructure that we built, we've built that's future proof. So we've really taken . FHIR to heart to take a look at we know that this is going to be scalable and we're positioning ourselves well for the future.

So we have this smart infrastructure. We built this platform that when we talk about the intelligence of the platform, it's not just what we're doing with a eyes, how we're leveraging data in terms of how we're presenting this to clinicians at the point of care. Some advanced features that we're doing with precision medicine with our genomic solution and leading the industry there in terms of taking that discrete data and to be able to use it to advance cancer care and more use cases emerging and behavioral health.

And we've also built around this, we call it like an extensible ecosystem for innovation through our Meditech Alliance and our Greenfield workspace. because we have these APIs, we can have app developers coming in and creating some augmentive technologies around Expanse. And, to Chris's point, we want to encourage that.

Because we understand that our organizations will have some choice. And they'll have different kind of vendors or solutions that they want to plug in to augment whatever it is they need around Expanse. Expanse. So that for us has continued to motivate the team. So there's so many different facets to what we're trying to do for the platform, the infrastructure and also the environment that we built around that for collaboration.

You're building internal sandboxes

And I love that we're getting to tell your story in real time here at HIMSS.

thank you so much. We appreciate the opportunities.

Yeah, we can't wait to keep seeing it and how it gets deployed and grows and keep us in the loop. We'll keep talking about it and seeing the benefits to the patient, to the clinician, to our industry.

Thank you for the groundbreaking work. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.

Thanks

for listening to this Interview in Action episode. If you found value in this, share it with a peer. It's a great chance to discuss and in some cases start a mentoring relationship. One way you can support the show is to subscribe and leave us a rating. If you could do that would be great, thanks for listening. That's all for now.