Meditech: What It Is - And What It Isn't

By Lorna Green

I love Meditech.

I'm what you might consider a Meditech lifer. For more than 15 years, I worked in a hospital that had Meditech across almost every area of the hospital. And, I was lucky enough to get both the clinical and IT perspectives – I first came on as a nurse actually using the system, and eventually transitioned to be an IT analyst and manager.

Through this experience, I learned that not everyone feels the same way about Meditech as I do. For me, it was stable, integrated and had great reporting capabilities. It was there for me when I needed it, and it got the job done.

But what I quickly found out was that because Meditech was our go-to system for almost everything, people often accused it of lacking in certain areas. As I heard these conversations, it became my personal mission to defend my loyal Meditech system.

And then it hit me.

Meditech was put in place to be our health information system – a system that goes beyond just managing clinical information. But just because it was comprehensive, that didn't mean it was designed to handle every type of monitoring, workflow and content management activity. I'm talking about gaps in areas like fetal/maternal monitoring, PACS, cardiology and endoscopy.

Since this realization, my mission has changed – it's about defining what Meditech is, and what it isn't. It's only when hospitals have this down pat that they can know when Meditech is enough for their needs and when they need Meditech and other systems.

It's interesting – back then, one of these "other systems" that came up all the time was something we called "scanning and archiving." We needed this system because we identified that we had multiple documentation vendors – none of which talked to Meditech – leaving us with a fragmented medical record. It became critical for us to have all patient documentation accessible via one system. Today, you'll see what we called "scanning and archiving" as the main reason why enterprise content management (ECM) software solutions were designed in the first place.

But as hard as I try, people still accuse Meditech of not being a good system because it doesn't do it all. Fortunately, forums like the upcoming Meditech user group conference, called MUSE, provide a chance to get some clarity. I'll be there, and am happy to chat about my experience. You can find me at booth #608.

SOURCE: Meditech