Today we have another interview in action from the conferences that just happened down here in Miami and Orlando. My name is bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week health, a set of channels dedicated to keeping health it staff current and engaged. We want to thank our show sponsors who are investing in developing the next generation of health leaders, Gordian dynamics, Quill health tau site nuance, Canaan, medical, and current health.

Check them out at this week. health.com/today. Here we go. We are from HIMS 2022, and we are here with Helen Waters with Meditech. Great.

Good morning. Great to be back in hymns. It's it's awesome to see people again and to see energy around healthcare. It,

yeah, this is kind of fun. It's uh, it's fun to see you actually it's it's been a while, although you're a part of the chime board, so it gets to see you there.

Right. Um, we are going to talk to the Google announcement, but you, uh, you haven't. I do

I do. So at the end of January, I was promoted to chief operating officer in Meditech, which is, uh, a great pleasure for me to assume that level of responsibility for the company. I think most people know I've been with the company a long time in different capacities from frontline field sales and marketing to an operational role back to sales and market.

Today I have a sales and marketing business development and product management, and I'm very happy to be overtime expanding that a little bit further and having an impact. The

Google health announcement is really cool, but I want to start with expanse because I want to feel like I, I can take a little credit for expanse.

I was a, a pretty tough customer of Meditech. And for years, you know, we tried to make the architecture work and it's, it's no different from the other year. We had to do all sorts of gyrations to make them work. As we were trying to scale them up and get bigger. And we were one of the larger health systems.

We about six and a half billion dollars, 16 hospitals running on Meditech. Um, and it got to a point where running that architecture. Uh, it was difficult and we always pushed, you let's go to the cloud was going to the cloud. Right. So now you have experienced health. Tell me a little bit about expanse and where that's,

where that's going.

Sure. No, it's a great question. And, um, you were quite the extraordinary forward-thinking and challenging customer, which is always a good thing from a vendor point of view, even on the tough days. Um, so expanse is the by-product of Meditech's realization that healthcare was changing. The delivery system was going to be modernized to be more integrated in nature.

That physician burnout and tools and technology that were built in the mid nineties or the early two thousands were not going to take us where we needed to go. So we stopped during the heyday of meaningful use and built an completely integrated ambulatory hospital-based system, outpatient system long-term care, behavioral health, and.

Um, into a mobile platform. And so we built it to be a native web architecture. We built it to operate in the cloud, which we were excited about. We heard a lot of the commentary that we had had from customers over the years about the power and potential of the cloud to scale and to do that well without all of the burdensome aspects of running a large it organization, it was.

Um, and we've been really pleased with the market's response to the platform. Um, one thing that we love about the industry after this many years, it never stops more. You do the more people desire, the more you must continue your journey forward. And so expanses a combination of multiple years of thinking and realizing the kind of impact we wanted to have in healthcare looking forward.

Uh, not looking backwards and it culminated with a really strong ambulatory platform, which has helped catapult us in a very integrated, strong way.

No, I, I love the architecture, but I noticed when you start from scratch, essentially Greenfield, sorry. I mean, I'm sure it wasn't completely Greenfield, right?

You, you, uh, cause you went to leverage that those years of. But the UI is, is nice. I mean, it's a lot better than what I, I

remember. Right. So paramount to everything that was going to happen. You know, I always tell people, if you think about meaningful use, the government came in and said, take old technology and change the healthcare delivery system and force it down.

The throats of doctors and nurses who are busy and burden. We saw that happening. And we saw the impact of a UI that could make a difference so that we would make it more mobile and commensurate with everything else they do with their day. So they're using it on phones, they're tapping and swiping the same way.

They're reading newspapers and banking and buying airline tickets. And that was the fundamental paradigm. We wanted to go for, I think we have dragged the market forward and web based technology and mobile solutions. And I think the fact that we can make them more productive, um, document on time, get home on time.

Uh, everything was designed by physicians with physicians. So Meditech. Technical background, great coding. And we decided that we should let the intended users drive all of the designs from a clinical point of view. And I think the result of that is expanse and it's, it's, it's shown

yeah, the workflows really interesting, but I want to get it . To the Google health announcement.

So, uh, just came out this morning. So tell us a little bit about that in

hospital.

Originally went to the cloud with Google in 2018. And that was our original opportunity to take expands to a new architecture in the cloud. Um, we realized the power and potential of this partnership, which has grown deeper over time.

And there's a lot of synergy between, uh, some of the culture of Google and some of the culture of Meditech in terms of deep technical prowess. We saw an opportunity to consider the next iteration of where health it is going, which is clearly into a more interoperable. We saw an opportunity to fulfill the promise of healthcare in the sense of bringing data in to a very intuitive view for physicians that incorporates the current encounter, but also searches in summarizes data from legacy.

Or other vendor systems. And that's exactly the part of Google that we're taking advantage of. So I think if you look at the power and the assets and the experience of Meditech in terms of healthcare and clinical systems and Google, in terms of search and summarization and UI, we've got a really powerful story to tell.

So we will enable what ultimately we want to be as long to tune a health record that's person centered. Regardless of the system source, easy to access for docs.

And I'm sitting here thinking as a client, which is how I always think through these interviews. Right. There's there's still a lot of potential behind that partnership, isn't it sure

there's potential behind every partnership that succeeds.

Right. I think for us, we, we wanted to begin with a version of that tool set that we thought was in great company. To both of our organizations. And I think the, the assets that Google brings to bear from a technology from a search perspective, for sure.

Well, yeah, that's simple search on top of the EHR pulling all this, and it's not only the EHR now you're, you're reaching across potentially all the index assets, uh, that, that referred to that patient.

That's correct. And, and that's, I think the holy grail of the next. Era and health it, right. It can't be simply that every health system is on the same technology system to get an interoperable view. You have to be able in this day and age with the standards we have, uh, and with the advancements of technology and architecture to bring to.

Disparate solutions into a single view. And I think that's where, uh, the Google team will be very helpful architecturally to Meditech and the Meditech healthcare experience would be invaluable to Google. So

when ever anybody hears Google involved in health care, they go to these sension project Nightingale and, and people have a misconception with the, the access that Google has to this data.

Don't they. Um, mentioned this a few times in my conversations with the Google, that there's a lot of missed communication about what that means for Google to be involved in healthcare. And maybe to a degree there was in those stories, but this will be a very highly protected search and summarization to the customer's instance, not for sale, not for public consumption.

Um, privacy, HIPAA compliance is something I think Google has shown a lot of passion for it. And the way they treat data, even in our cloud instances, it's still in a cloud that is partitioned off from any access to their toolsets, um, because it ultimately belongs to the customers and certainly to the individual patients.

So I think a lot of misconception that they're anxious to address in the marketplace.

So you're closing here. So we're getting towards the end of our time, you were at last week's conference at the live conference and we were at the HIMSS conference. Any, any, anything surprised you or.

Um, I thought the Vive conference was new and it was different and it was energetic in the sense of how much, uh, augmentation is happening around these foundational tool sets of VHS.

I've found the conversations on the panels, fascinating and stimulating as far as what's next for healthcare in terms of deep learning and, and all of the ethics that go around that I found some amazing. Tools and apps that I thought good for these innovators who are coming about using amazing stuff going on there.

So I love the energy of a vibe and I thought it was a great combination of the traditional chime approach to the health approach brought neatly together into an event that was, that was great. We're only a few hours into to this today. Um, it feels a little. Busy than it has been in past years, but we're seeing a lot of prospects and customers here, which has been great.

Yeah. I mean, we're looking at it at your booth. There's an awful lot of demonstrations going on. People are there and a

lot of activity. Yeah. I think the last couple of years for us have been great. We've been growing and adding net new sites, which is really important to us. We knew that we had a strong and loyal base.

And we were happy that they were migrating to expands, but the real true test of the platform would be the conversions from other vendor systems and those are happening and for good reason and purpose. So we're excited about the

future. Yeah, I would think the most powerful thing that you've done at this point is you've with expanse.

You've brought something to the ambulatory market, right. That can really take off from a, from a price point standpoint, from a power standpoint, from a mobility standpoint. That's it. Thank you for waiting until I wasn't a CIO to bring that out.

We had that chance. We never know. Right. Look at Tom. Brady's coming back to football.

They, so, but you know, I think the other thing that we did was we proved bill that the industry had a lot of misconceived notion about our company and about the passion that we have for what we do and how much of an impact we, we intend to continue. So I think there were a lot of naysayers and doubters about Meditech and where it would end up.

And we've said all along that, you know, we need to lean into the change that's happening in healthcare. We are embracing it. We can stay true to who we are and what we believe in fundamentally, but we can evolve and grow. And that's what we've been doing. And that's a really exciting message for us to be delivering to the market.

Thank you for your time. My pleasure. Good to see you again. Take care of.

Another great interview. I want to thank everybody who spent time with us at the conferences. It is phenomenal that you shared your wisdom and your experience with the community, and it is greatly appreciated. We also want to thank our channel sponsors who are investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders, Gordian dynamics, Quill health tau site nuance, Canon medical, and current health.

Check them out at this week. health.com/today. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.