MEDITECH’s annual leadership conference, MEDITECH LIVE, kicked off Wednesday afternoon, bringing together customers, vendor partners, and healthcare leaders from across the industry for three days of learning and networking.
MEDITECH’s Executive Vice President and COO, Helen Waters, opened the conference by highlighting the company’s latest advancements with its intelligent Expanse platform and its plans to improve operational efficiency and transform the clinician-patient experience through deeper use of conversational and generative AI.
“As an industry, it is imperative that we unburden clinicians so they can focus on what matters most — the relationships with their patients,” states Waters. “MEDITECH’s focus is on transforming the clinician experience. We’re solving real challenges today by supporting personalization and mobility; tackling the documentation burden through the infusion of ambient listening, conversational and generative AI; and more efficiently leveraging data through intelligent search and summarization capabilities.”
Waters further emphasized MEDITECH’s continuous evolution of the Expanse infrastructure and how it is more deeply leveraging the power of the cloud to optimize how Expanse stores and leverages data. The company looks to use cloud file stores and extend the accessibility of FHIR APIs through its FHIR stores as it develops its next-generation solutions.
“With Expanse, we’ve built an open ecosystem for innovation. And through our Traverse Exchange network, we’re making it easier to exchange the right data in a meaningful format, in a discrete and flexible way,” she explains.
Improving operational efficiency was also top of mind. Waters shared MEDITECH’s plans to leverage machine learning to optimize capacity and expand automation across its revenue cycle solutions — to streamline code capture, claims processing, and payments. Efforts include work with the HL7® Da Vinci Project Burden Reduction initiative to improve the communication between providers, patients, and payers by sharing real-time documentation, streamlining prior authorizations, and reducing burden by automating these data exchanges.
Throughout the day, several MEDITECH customers and partner panelists reflected on this same prevailing theme, highlighting the power of data in supporting their AI, cybersecurity, data analytics, and optimization strategies. Farhana Alarakhiya, Chief Data Innovation Officer for Aga Khan University shared how the university is harnessing EHR data as a strategic asset to proactively manage the health needs of their population. Alarakhiya spoke about the importance of innovating within their context and developing protocols that work best for the patients they serve.
Kurt Barwis, FACHE, President and CEO of Bristol Health, also spoke of the harm caused by delays in the prior authorization process. He shared his own experiences advocating on behalf of his organization and patients by carefully documenting all encounters with insurance companies, appealing denials where prior authorization requests were delayed by insurance companies, and lobbying for change with government bodies.
The day concluded with a deeper dive into the power of interoperability as MEDITECH Senior Director of Interoperability and Market and Product Strategy, Mike Cordeiro, shared updates on MEDITECH’s new Traverse Exchange U.S. interoperability network, including a company-wide initiative of getting all eligible Expanse customers live throughout 2025.
“Data is a conduit for enabling better decision-making, but it’s imperative to have the right data,” Cordeiro states. “CCDs are burdensome, time-consuming, and not meaningful. Our mission with Traverse Exchange is to advance data access and usability by providing powerful, intuitive, intelligent tools that seamlessly integrate external healthcare data into MEDITECH’s EHR, whether sourced from other MEDITECH organizations or other EHR vendors.”
Traverse Exchange is a private network that will connect with other QHINs going beyond the typical USCDI data set by identifying and implementing data sets that have a positive impact and fill data gaps. According to Cordeiro, the network will enable customers to share structured data using HL7 FHIR discretely without pushing or receiving a structured document. Doing so will enable more meaningful data exchange tailored to the specific role or specialty of the clinician. It will also support the onboarding of health apps to enable individual access at scale, without that vendor having to onboard individually from health system to health system.
Waters also envisions Traverse Exchange as an essential tool for helping healthcare organizations maintain their autonomy so they can focus on serving the needs of their communities. “By ensuring interoperable data is easy to consume, meaningfully displayed, and simple to understand, we can eliminate the notion that an organization must change EHRs to achieve true interoperability,” she says.
MEDITECH LIVE continues Thursday with two more days of collaboration, innovation, and strategic discussions aimed at shaping the future of healthcare technology. Follow #MEDITECHLIVE for the latest updates.
About MEDITECH
MEDITECH empowers healthcare organizations around the globe to expand their vision of what’s possible with Expanse, the world’s most intelligent EHR platform. Expanse answers the demands of an overburdened workforce: personalized workflows, intuitive functionality, interoperable systems, and innovative AI applications, all working together to drive better outcomes. See why thousands of healthcare organizations in 27 countries and territories choose Expanse. Visit ehr.meditech.com and follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn, X/Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
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